The fable concerns a grasshopper who has spent the warm months singing away while the ant (or ants in some editions) worked to store up food for winter. After the winter has come, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger, and upon asking the ant for food is only rebuked for its idleness. The story is used to teach the virtues of hard work and saving, and the perils of improvidence. Some versions of the fable state a moral at the end, along the lines of:
....Idleness brings want
....To work today is to eat tomorrow
....It is best to prepare for the days of necessity
OLD VERSION
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!
MODERN VERSION
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfort table home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.
How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing, 'It's Not Easy Being Green'
Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news stations film the group singing, 'We shall overcome' Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper's sake.
Nancy Pelosi & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.
Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity & Anti-Grasshopper Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer.
The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the government.
Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill Clinton appointed from a list of single parent welfare recipients.
The ant loses the case.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant's food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he doesn't maintain it
The ant has disappeared in the snow.
The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.
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4 comments:
Yeah, but you're forgetting the moral: wise up and move on to scamming the next ant before all of the last ant's stuff is gone.
Reminds me of the movie A Bugs Life. A classic.
A very good post SER. Makes you think.
I don't give a rats behind about the grasshopper. One thing that worries me are the offspring that aren't fed and warm due to the parents' slothfulness. It wasn't their fault. The other thing is the crime that can take place when these "victims" of the system are denied.
It is one thing to rob my pocket through the system. It is another thing to beat me over the head or break into my home to take my possessions. Just because you don't give, doesn't mean they won't still take.
And of course, there is yet another version.
Ant works 2 jobs, still can't afford health insurance for family or college for baby ants, can't keep up with inflation, uses credit cards and home equity loans just to keep up with basic living expenses and ordinary medical bills, wife gets sick and huge hospital bills make Ant loose farm to foreclosure and file bankruptcy. Credit card companies jack interest up to 28% on unpaid past-due balance creating a debt load so large even Ant can't carry it.
Grasshopper works on Wall Street, rakes in billions for himself and other Grasshoppers in massive Monopoly-money rackets and derivative pyramid schemes which turn financial system into a train wreck and threaten entire global economy. Hundreds of billions of Ant-taxpayer dollars get 'redistributed' to bail out Grasshopper and F.O.G. who go to luxury spa and contemplate 6 to 7 digit year-end bonuses while complaining about paying taxes between loofah treatments.
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