Distant Neighbors by John Rosenberg

Here’s a picture of the cute little bunny you helped pay for.  It is a full grown white Alsatian with tufted paws, ruby eyes and a cotton ball tail.  Your charitable contribution to the Bunny Fund has gone a long way toward enhancing the quality of life for the inhabitants of this unfortunate island in the West Indies.  Until now, they have had to survive solely on mangoes, rice, fish and the occasional coconut.

On the facing page is a photo of one of the native children, Zup Phordynnor, roasting the bunny on a spit. Through your charitable contribution, Zup and his family will benefit from the daily consumption of high protein mammalian flesh. While some people have informed us that the photo looks more like a small child or fetus with a rod running through it, we can assure you that our inspectors carefully monitor these people and it is, in fact, what a bunny looks like once its fir has been singed off and it has been roasted over an open fire.

Since some of the bunnies we supplied arrived pregnant, and we do not support terminating pregnancy for any reason, we allowed the bunnies to come to term and produce more bunnies. In turn, those bunnies mated with their siblings and produced an excess of inbred bunnies which the native people were able to eat and, due to a surplus, sell for a profit.

This amortized your contribution so, in a sense, your eighty dollars didn’t pay for just one bunny but for four thousand sixty-eight. 

Since the bunnies have no natural predators on this island they’ve now proliferated to the extent that they can feed every man, woman and child for, our experts predict, the next 200 years. Or until the bunny’s food supplies run out and the island is ravaged.

In this regard we are pleased to announce the inauguration of a new program, the Coyote Fund which will bring nature’s most inexpensive canine companion to the unfortunate people of Binibili, none of whom have ever had a dog as a pet.

The coyote is a durable animal that has persisted through the ages as other breeds have died out. Our pilot program raises them to serve as loyal pets. Your additional donation of $150 will provide a Coyote Dog for every Binibilinese family.

Here is a picture of several prominent television personalities standing beside their adopted Coyote Dogs. They have proudly added their endorsement to this worthwhile cause. They realize that even though TV plays a significant role in our lives and the lives of people around the world (except in places like Binibili) it’s not enough. They want to make an enduring difference, one that goes beyond syndication and re-runs.  By joining the Coyote Fund they are able to show that they aren’t just superficial tools of a marketing culture that appeals to the basest, most simplistic thoughts and desires, but substantial human beings who should be taken seriously and respected for more than having a good agent and a hit TV series.

Thank you for your tax-deductible donation. Our ultimate goal is to provide the same Mercedes-Benz cars that we drive for every family on this island, within the next twenty years. To this end we are working with developer contractors to maximize the underutilized resources of this sad little atoll and build paved roads and turnpikes. In order to provide places for the Mercedes-Benz cars to visit we will develop condominiums, hotels, strip malls and shopping centers with mixed retail.