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Inanity of the Easter Bunny

by George Jones on April 25, 2011

Dead Easter Bunny

Silly wabbit!

In my childhood, Easter used to be an innocent time filled with the derring-do of trying to spy a wascally-wabbit moving from house to house dropping off ungainly-sized baskets of candy at the back door. Like Santa, actual sightings were obviously imagined but reported with great enthusiasm.

Over time we came to suspect that our parents were somehow involved with said bunny and conceived a strategy to determine their culpability. One fine Easter Sunday we caught my mother trying to quickly descend the back stairs after dropping our Easter baskets at the back door and then knocking on it. Unbeknownst to her, we’d covered all the doors in advance.

What my mother hadn’t expected was the ability of her children to strategize. Can’t really blame her, though – we hadn’t given her much reason to believe we could. She’d also clearly overestimated her ability to move quickly and stealthily down the stairs. It seemed apparent that she’d hit the age where you could do one or the other, but not both.

So when I heard the telltale knock that always announced the arrival of the candy-dispensing rodent, I was only a few feet away from the back door, and was able to react quickly. When I opened the back door and stepped outside, I saw my mother legging it down the stairs toward the corner of the house. I shouted, “Hey, Mom – stop!” to end the chase, but she didn’t stop until she hit the corner of the house.

To her ever-loving credit, my mom pointed to somewhere out of my line-of-sight and excitedly exclaimed, “There he goes! I was trying to catch him!”

Yeah, nice try, Mom.

Of course, the revelation that a magical rabbit was not delivering tooth decay at speeds heretofore attributed only to Santa Claus began to chip away at my belief in magical things. My faith in the Tooth Fairy – like the invincibility of France – was shaken to the core.

It caused me to begin to ask a lot of questions – and if the answers were not always terribly logical to me, I would continue to ask more questions – again and again – like a 5 year-old trying to work your last nerve. It wasn’t that I was trying to be obnoxious – often I was just trying to understand the answer in parallel to some aspect of my empirical experience as a human being or some proximate correlation to what I understand as logical.

In other words, my response to the illogical or improbable is somewhat atypical.

Jesus Christ

See? Looks like he's from France, not Jerusalem.

For example, when someone emails me a “picture” of Jesus along with some plaintive homily meant to inspire piety, it typically inspires a question like this: “Wait … is someone under the impression that Jesus is from Reims?” For some reason, every “picture” I’ve seen of the Son of God looks like a guy from northern France, not northeast Africa. Yeah, things like that always strike me funny.

The Resurrection is particularly problematic for me. Although I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of an omniscient power sending a savior to humankind many thousands of years after humankind had been building false idols and casting perfectly doable virgins into fire pits, I’m really not understanding the need for crucifixion or the 3-day waiting period between crucifixion and resurrection.

You’d think a divine power – even one enclosed in a cloak of human frailty – could outwit Roman centurions like Obi-Wan sliding past a storm-trooper checkpoint. Crucifixion? Fuck that – why not head to the Sea of Galilee and hoof it into the water when the centurion SWAT team arrives? You’d think the spectacle of a human being actually t-r-e-a-d-i-n-g water would be enough to end any speculation on who Jesus actually was and nip that whole crucifixion-thing right in the bud.

In terms of getting your point across, wouldn’t that strategy have been much more effective?

But let’s say everything went down just like the Bible said it did. Fine, so why did Mary and her friends wait until Sunday to drop by to rub spices on the corpse? Yeah, it was a holiday weekend, but come on, why wait until Sunday? I think any coroner in the world would tell you that putrefaction can start 48 hours after death and the odor of this process is not exactly sublime.

So these are some of the thoughts that run through my head when I hear about magical things like angels, resurrection, virgin birth, floating zoos, talking snakes, or supply-side economics. It’s just the way my mind works.

But in my heart, the specter of a magical rabbit conjures up that magnificent image of my mother hurtling down the back steps, trying to squeeze one more year of magic out of the Easter Bunny facade for the obvious enjoyment of her children. It’s an inanity to be sure, but a good one, I think.

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

Jodi April 27, 2011 at 11:51 am

I def like it better than using piranah’s to trim your genitals. 🙂

Reply

George April 27, 2011 at 2:18 pm

Yeah, bunnies tend to conjure up more favorable imagery than omnivorous fish and genital mutilation. 🙂

Reply

George April 27, 2011 at 1:00 am

I’m not sure life ends at the grave or not, but I’ve always heard that we’re going to a better place … which makes me wonder, well, if it’s a better place, why are we all trying to hard to stay in this one? 🙂

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Linda J April 25, 2011 at 7:57 am

Nicely done!

Reply

George April 27, 2011 at 1:20 am

Thanks!

Reply

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