Survival: A Tale of Two Bunnies
(This column was first published in the Star-Telegram in March 2009).
The bunny with the gimpy leg works his way through the meadow, struggling along to get back to his den in his old and familiar lop-sided hop. A quick flash of a shadow alerts his flight instinct – he knows he’s been spotted by the hawk. With wide eyes and terrified leaps, he races to find shelter under the closest thorny shrub. But thanks to the gimpy leg, his strides are ill-timed and don’t offer him the lightning speed of his other bunny brethren.
The bunny doesn’t see the hawk closing in on him, but he sees the shadow becoming larger, diving rapidly towards Earth. Suddenly, the hawk shrieks, and the bunny is paralyzed with fear – he won’t reach cover in time. As the hawk opens his talons for the kill grab …
Obama’s gigantic spending package jumps in and saves the day. The bunny lives long enough to mate, and eventually the meadow is littered with bunnies that also hop sideways. Hooray for progress! Oh wait, you didn’t want a meadow full of gimpy bunnies?
You’re allowed to feel bad for the bunny who doesn’t make it. After the hawk gets his talons around him, it’s a terrible sight for everybody (except the hawk) to see a meadow covered with whiskers and bits of rabbit fur. But over time, the hawk is doing the bunny community a favor by fine-tuning their lineage so that only the most successful live on.
If we violate the rules of the natural order of success and demise, we reward the ignorance that got those companies where they are in the first place. Here you go, you big dummy — congratulations for not being ready for the inevitabilities of business hardships in the global market: Here is a fat wad of money that we took away from taxpayers who earned it.
It’s a sad tale, but the gimpy bunny is supposed to die. The company who leans on tradition, who lives with fat operating costs and a stubborn corporate vision, who can’t reform when the world changes and won’t look ahead, is supposed to go away. Even if you save the gimpy bunny from the hawk this time, what about next time, and the time after that? Not only will our children have to pay the bill for all these business rescue plans, we’ll have to explain to them why their meadow is full of gimpy bunnies and tragic bits of rabbit fur all the time.
A few days later, the hawk is hungry again. She circles the sky, ready for another chewy bunny morsel. She spots another bunny in the meadow and turns around for the kill dive. Silly rabbits.
Unfortunately for the hawk, this bunny isn’t like his gimpy brother. He’s lean, his legs are lightning fast, and he remembers his poor brother’s demise. In fact, this time, he’s ready for the hawk. He was watching the skies and saw the hawk long before she saw him.
As the hawk tucks her wings in for the dive, the lean brother takes two hops and ducks into a new burrow that he dug last week, one of many that he dug across the meadow. This bunny decided that he isn’t going to vanish, to leave an idiot-shaped hole in the world economy and become a lesson to others. He is proactive, he’s lightning-fast, he adapts, and so he will live on to litter his meadow with lean, smart little bunnies.
The bailout plan may save a few companies this year, but it’s a very temporary solution because it doesn’t fix the problem. We need smarter bunnies.