World War Z_ An Oral History of the Zombie War ( PDFDrive )

be utilized effectively. To be perfectly candid, our supply of talent was at a critical low. Ours was a
postindustrial or service-based economy, so complex and highly specialized that each individual
could only function within the confines of its narrow, compartmentalized structure. You should have
seen some of the “careers” listed on our first employment census; everyone was some version of
an “executive,” a “representative,” an “analyst,” or a “consultant,” all perfectly suited to the
prewar world, but all totally inadequate for the present crisis. We needed carpenters, masons,
machinists, gunsmiths. We had those people, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were necessary.
The first labor survey stated clearly that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were
classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation. We required a massive job retraining program. In
short, we needed to get a lot of white collars dirty.
It was slow going. Air traffic was nonexistent, roads and rail lines were a shambles, and fuel,
good Lord, you couldn’t find a tank of gas between Blaine, Washington, and Imperial Beach,
California. Add to this the fact that prewar America not only had a commuter-based infrastructure,
but that such a method also allowed for severe levels of economic segregation. You would have
entire suburban neighborhoods of upper-middle-class professionals, none of whom had possessed
even the basic know-how to replace a cracked window. Those with that knowledge lived in their
own blue-collar “ghettos,” an hour away in prewar auto traffic, which translated to at least a full
day on foot. Make no mistake, bipedal locomotion was how most people traveled in the beginning.
Solving this problem—no, challenge, there are no problems—was the refugee camps. There were
hundreds of them, some parking-lot small, some spreading for miles, scattered across the
mountains and coast, all requiring government assistance, all acute drains on rapidly diminishing
resources. At the top of my list, before I tackled any other challenge, these camps had to be
emptied. Anyone F-6 but physically able became unskilled labor: clearing rubble, harvesting crops,
digging graves. A lot of graves needed to be dug. Anyone A-1, those with war-appropriate skills,
became part of our CSSP, or Community Self-Sufficiency Program. A mixed group of instructors
would be tasked with infusing these sedentary, overeducated, desk-bound, cubicle mice with the
knowledge necessary to make it on their own.
It was an instant success. Within three months you saw a marked drop in requests for
government aid. I can’t stress how vital this was to victory. It allowed us to transition from a
zero-sum, survival-based economy, into full-blown war production. This was the National
Reeducation Act, the organic outgrowth of the CSSP. I’d say it was the largest jobs training
program since the Second World War, and easily the most radical in our history.
You’ve mentioned, on occasion, the problems faced by the NRA…
I was getting to that. The president gave me the kind of power I needed to meet any physical or
logistical challenge. Unfortunately, what neither he nor anyone on Earth could give me was the
power to change the way people thought. As I explained, America was a segregated workforce, and
in many cases, that segregation contained a cultural element. A great many of our instructors were
first-generation immigrants. These were the people who knew how to take care of themselves, how
to survive on very little and work with what they had. These were the people who tended small
gardens in their backyards, who repaired their own homes, who kept their appliances running for
as long as mechanically possible. It was crucial that these people teach the rest of us to break from
our comfortable, disposable consumer lifestyle even though their labor had allowed us to maintain
that lifestyle in the first place.
Yes, there was racism, but there was also classism. You’re a high-powered corporate attorney.