The Ant & the Grasshopper

Remember that timeless fable? Remember the lesson it teaches? That lesson is as timeless and true today as it ever was. Or is it?

Here's a retelling for modern times:

The ant works
hard in the withering heat and the rain 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 he is 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
comfortable 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.'


ACORN stages a
demonstration in front of the ant's house
where the news stations film the group singing,
“We shall overcome.”
Then Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the
group kneel down to pray to God for the
grasshopper's sake.


President Obama
condemns the ant and blames President
Bush, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus,
and the Pope for the grasshopper's plight.

Nancy Pelosi & Harry Reid
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 Green Czar and given to the
grasshopper.


The story ends as we see the grasshopper
and his free-loading friends finishing up the last
bits of the ant’s food
while the government house he is in, which, as
you recall, just happens to be the ant's
old house, crumbles around them because the
grasshopper doesn't maintain it.

The ant has
disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.


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 ramshackle, once prosperous and
once peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses
bringing the rest of the free world with it.



MORAL OF THE STORY:
Be careful how you vote in
2010.