It was the rabbits. Everyone knew it. Nobody was surprised. And that was certainly surprising, given that rabbits had not previously been carnivorous.
Most of the West Coast was gone before people began to believe it. Nobody wanted to look like an idiot, telling people that all the rabbits in California had started eating people. Certainly it was true, but you can only stretch truth so far. Nobody was going to believe in killer bunnies simply because they were true.
When I was growing up, I was told that we were searching for knowledge. Nowadays, we seem to search for information. But information isn’t knowledge. It’s just data.
If you’re somewhere that uses gold as a currency, or values it for its various properties, it might be nice to have a wagonful of gold. If you’re in a place where gold can be synthesized from discarded soda cans, then you might not want to have to schlep all that gold from hither to thither, especially if your only reward is going to be a sad body and a bunch of incredulous stares.
We’re using data to create synthetic knowledge, and it’s not the same as actual knowledge.
Maybe rabbits have eaten everything within five hundred miles of Bakersfield. How would you know? If the news didn’t want you to know, they’d simply swamp you with other stories, true or not.
Everyone knew it was the rabbits. Nobody was allowed to say it.
Perhaps being consumed by bunnies was, in the end, a sort of mercy.
