HARE BRAINED

I never believed in the Easter Bunny. The very idea seemed implausible at best to me. Even at the tender age of five I couldn’t ignore the fundamental disconnect between the egg and the rabbit.

Rabbits don't lay eggs. They don't even eat eggs. What eggo-centric lunatic dreamed up this harebrained mythology?  Rabbits are cute and soft, but they are not very bright. They eat grass and they poop a lot. Bunnies are basically just tiny, long eared cows. With short legs.  And I think their contribution to the world's methane surplus has been sorely under rated. Did I mention they were not good at mathematics? How are they supposed to count all these eggs?  We can assume they can't count above 16, because they only have four toes on every foot.  And if they can't count, how do they know how many eggs to leave in your yard? Listen - if you put an egg in front of a rabbit, the rabbit with nudge it aside to get to the grass underneath, even if it is plastic grass. You could even write the rabbit’s name on the side of the egg, and the rabbit would still ignore it.And yet every year we insist upon convincing our toddlers that for some reason a rabbit has chosen to hide vast numbers of eggs all over our back yards. Under bushes. Behind flower pots. In trees. What is wrong with us?! Rabbits can’t climb trees.You might as well tell your children that elephants have been herding water buffalo in your flower bed, or that squirrels are using your attic to store up their winter supply of canned beats. Why do we insist upon telling our children this particular absurd story?Where is this rabbit supposed to get all of these eggs? And from whom is he supposedly hiding them? From the chickens, perhaps - otherwise known as “the mothers”. If you think about it an Easter Egg Hunt is a mass kidnapping and we are encouraging our children to be accessories after the fact. The F.B.I. should be involved in this story line, or at least Farmer McGreggorThe very idea is so silly that most of the eggs hidden today aren’t even real, They're plastic. And they are filled with chocolate and licorice and sweet tarts, and other things that rabbits don’t eat! Show me a rabbit that eats sweet tarts and I will show you a candidate for hossenfeffer..Children eat those things. They are't healthy for the children, but they eat them anyway. Just like they eat old gum, or crickets. Those aren't good for children either, but given half a chance , any toddler with happily stick a live cricket in their mouth. And a few teenagers, too. And I understand that the Easter Egg hunt is for the children's entertainment. It’s just supposed to be fun. But couldn’t it be logical and fun at the same time? Couldn’t we have an Easter chicken hiding the eggs? Why does it have to be a bunny rabbit?! Maybe he could be the one looking for the eggs. Although why, I have no idea.
I know I’m overwrought over this. The Easter bunny is just another one of those little contradictions in logic accepted without question by most people, one of those silly little missing gears in the workings of our mental machinery, that don’t make any sense but seem to be required to hold our culture together.  Like Daylight savings time. Or that bar on boy’s bicycles. Or Keanu Reeves’ movie career.You could get excited about outrageous, silly things like this Easter Bunny  Or you can just ignore them, and pretend there is a logic to them, and live your life in some semblance of calm. But to do so would be a fraud and you know it!The truth shall set you free. I don’t know who said that but whoever agrees with it are argumentative enough they will probably out live the rest of us.  We deserve to know why it is that an Easter Bunny would hide eggs. And if the answer isn’t good enough, we have a right to pick our own illogical anthropomorphic creature upon which to base our Easter fun.Here’s all I could find out about the birth of the Easter Bunny.  Rabbits are an old German symbol of fertility, for obvious reasons. And the egg is a symbol of...I guess breakfast and birth  And if you put those two together, the Easter Egg Hunt becomes a rabbit symbolically hiding his fertility all over your back yard, where your children are encouraged to hunt until they find it.  Are we nuts?  When they are five or six years old we send them looking for the symbol of fertility in their own backyard.. When they are twelve we don't even want them to be taught about this in the public schools!  No wonder Americans are so screwed up. We get our childhood from a furry Cassanova, and our adolescence from Queen Victoria.Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because, oddly enough I once had a male rabbit actually find his fertility  in my back yard. All over my backyard. And his deposit left behind did not smell like eggs -  at least not fresh eggs. And I ended up with about fifty million female rabbits in my backyard for the next twenty-four hours or so. My dog was too scared to go outside. And I certainly didn’t want any small children going out there, either, because I wasn’t sure I could explain what they would see. Not to mention their propensity for picking things up and putting it in their mouths. What an Easter that was.But, getting back to the mythology - Why in God's name would you want your children to find the secret of fertility? And I think I have found the solution to that question. So you can have a grandchild, that’s why. Grandchildren are essential because they help you torture your adult children, thus completing one slice out of the circle of life pie chart.It’s curious that the chickens, who actually lay the millions of eggs that are stashed under bushes and flowers and lawn chairs on Easter Sunday, are not considered symbols of fertility. The feminists’ version of this is that these chicks do all the work while some crowing cock gets all the credit.  Thank goodness feminism has been totally discredited. Still, those hard boiled chicks may have a point.  Scrambled, like everything else in our polyglot culture, but a point never-the-less. I just wish I knew what the hell it was.

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