The Ant & the GrassHopper: TODAY

The Ant & The Grasshopper: TODAY

Grasshopper and the Ants This story came to me via e-mail. The author was not
specified. If you know the source please let me know
so that I can give proper credit! The Modern Version
about sums it all up, eh? For more parables or
satires follow the links below. Please add to this section
with your stories of learning, by emailing the Webmaster below.




ORIGINAL 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 he's 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.





MODERN AMERICAN 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 he's 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 and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering
grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with
a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp
contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this
poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so. Then a representative
of the NAGB (The National Association of GreenBugs) shows up on
Nightline and charges the ant with green bias, and makes the case
that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of
greenism. Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper,
and everybody cries when he sings "It's not easy being green."

Bill and Hillary Clinton make a special guest appearance on the
CBS Evening News to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do
everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the>
prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the
Reagan summers. Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with
Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the
grasshopper, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to
make him pay his "fair share."

Finally, the EEOC drafts the "Economic Equity and Anti-Greenism
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 hearing officers
that Bill appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who
can only hear cases on Thursday's between 1:30 and 3:00 PM. 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's in, which just happens to be the ant's old house,
crumbles around him since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The
ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the
grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are
showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly applauding group
of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned
in America.



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