The Grasshopper and the Ant - Old Parable

The 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 he's a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed, but the grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY: Be responsible for yourself!!

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The 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 she'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 fed, while others are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC, ABC, and CNN all 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."

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant's house where the news networks film the group singing "We shall overcome." Jesse then has the group kneel down and pray for the grasshopper's sake.

Ted Kennedy & Nancy Pelosi exclaim in an interview with Katie Couric 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 and Anti-Grasshopper Act", retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to hire a sufficient number of green bugs and, having nothing left to pay his retroactive tax, his home is confiscated by the government.

Hillary Clinton 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. As the story ends, 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.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY: I leave it to you to decide........!

-Author unknown