The Ant and The Grasshopper (Classic)
In
a field one summer's day a Grasshopper was hopping about,
chirping and singing to its heart's content. An Ant passed
by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was
taking to the nest.
"Why not come and chat with me,"
said the Grasshopper, "instead of toiling and moiling
in that way?"
"I am helping to lay up food
for the winter," said the Ant, "and recommend
you to do the same."
"Why
bother about winter?" said the Grasshopper; we have
got plenty of food at present." But the Ant went on
its way and continued its toil.
When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food and found
itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing
every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected
in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew: .......It is best to prepare
for the days of necessity.
The Ant and the Grasshopper (Modern)
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
(National Association of Green Bugs) 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,
or as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the 80's."
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 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 appointed. 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 died, his body disappears
in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought
by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Barack Obama standing before a wildly applauding group of Democrats
announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned
in America. | 
