I was going to write something more serious when my eye caught a photo on the Sunday Los Angeles Times where two security guards were trying to wrest a large plastic trash bag from the hands of one of the prodigious street vendors working the downtown area. The large plastic trash bag was filled with rabbits. Easter rabbits.
It would make sense that come the Easter Holiday, rabbits would be a featured attraction in the hustling market area known as Santee Alley. Santee Alley is roughly ten square blocks and is centered by the alley itself where clustered stalls offer the shopper everything from cheap toys and electronics, to knock off designer jeans and counterfeit designer wallets and handbags, and the ubiquitous bootleg DVD’s. And animals. On any given day iguanas and large, green turtles are offered for sale, with the occasional chicken or rooster.
The vendors are a polyglot of ethnic diversity, a regular lower shelf market bazaar where unclaimed shipments from China and irregular offloads compete with the counterfeit accessories to attract the passersby. To be kind, Santee Alley is not typically filled with high earners, unless they are slumming or looking for the odd bargain on counterfeit purses they don’t mind carrying to buffer the bad economy while still impressing their friends. It is more the working class shopping mecca, mothers in toy with their multiple children, the in-laws and grandparents tootling on behind.
On weekends, the Santee Alley area is seriously crowded and to enter the Alley itself one does the slow shopping shuffle. Some vendors will proffer their wares, and others may whisper that lurking inside the canvas duffel bags or plastic garbage bags in the back of the stall some fine counterfeit handbags, wallets, jeans, DVD’s and whatever are waiting for your perusal. Some will claim they come from the same manufacturer as the original authentic designer version. Some are too bored to bother with any conceivable ruse.
But it is Easter time and there are rabbits. People often ask how rabbits came into the Easter story, but I have no definitive idea. Something about fertility, as with the eggs, those painted eggs, signifying fertility and renewal. If rabbits laid eggs it would be an easier legend to comprehend. But they don’t. So suffice it to say the fertility aspect of Easter is left to both mammals and fowl, humans notwithstanding. Humans having sex and multiplying, despite all Biblical notions, is something to be kept on the quiet. Even if the concept of human sex oddly is an obscure notion given the large families in Santee Alley.
But to the rabbits. So here are the rabbits in little cages, being offered for sale at the going rate of $20 apiece. That seems expensive, but then I am hardly the rabbit farmer of legend. In fact in my youth and relative innocence I had one bunny that I kept over Easter and then gave back to the pet store, once I discovered all rabbits really do is wiggle their noses and crap round turds just about everywhere they travel. But my brief rabbit ownership came a long time ago when the information network was confined to pretty much what your parents told you and what Cold War events were delivered on only three television stations. In one’s ignorance about esoteric things about rabbits and such, one just went with the flow until self-discovery changed the course of direction.
Of course these were the times when pet shops and farmers markets sold painted turtles and spray painted chickens, all done up in Easter colors of pink and yellow. For the most part, the whole Easter chicken and rabbit business was a genocide program. The dyes in the spray paint would usually kill the baby chicks soon after sale. Although I did have one friend who actually raised the chicken to maturity. It was so odd seeing a grown chicken living in a console television box in the basement of a row house. It was if nothing else a marked testament to survival.
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The turtles were year round and survived longer, despite the garish colored images that were spray painted on their shells. Longer here is a relative issue, as was survival. Everyone I knew had a story about the dog or cat eating the baby chicks and rabbits, or giving the rabbits to the neighbors where it was eaten for dinner the following night. The turtles would escape from their plastic bowls and either be eaten by the cats or lost to the crevices in the house or found a week later a victim of the rinse cycle on the washing machine.
But that was long ago. For the most part I thought the whole Easter Bunny fetish was long gone, along with the painted baby chicks, as the society has advanced and had access to information regarding the health and well being of these long eared creatures. I guess not. According to the Times article, the Bunny trade is booming. These are young rabbits that are not weaned and suffering from malnutrition. In all, buying one of these rabbits and taking it home gives a whole new meaning to dead on arrival.
But, either way, once purchased for the Big Easter pageant, the Easter Bunny is in for a real rough time. He is either DOA, perhaps a mercy killing given the choices. Or the rabbit who lives through the rigors of the holiday season may ultimately face extermination when he wears out his welcome. Perhaps as the main course for a Saturday dinner, if he miraculously manages to grow plump and mature.
The Los Angeles Security Guards and law enforcement authorities try their best to rein in the illegal Easter Bunny Business. They rescue these poor creatures and place them in a shelter where they at least have a chance to survive. The rabbits are fed kitten formula and colostrum pills. The ubiquitous lettuce the condemned rabbits are seen nibbling on ever so cutely will destroy the system of young rabbits.
Oh well…rabbits and lettuce…another myth all shot to hell. So this is pretty serious, after all. Happy Easter.
