The Ant and the Grasshopper

While I'm posting forwarded emails, here's an old one that just came in again today. It's unfortunate that ants are black as opposed to white, because we wouldn't want anyone to be confused about the message. Thank goodness the author made references to Jesse Jackson, Oprah, the EEOC, and welfare recipients to make it clear.

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER STORY

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 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 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 and 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.

Moral of the Story: Be careful how you vote in 2008.

Here's the lefty version (a little too lefty for my taste, but it's okay):

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house, laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper takes a job at Wal-Mart.

Come winter, the ant finds he has more supplies than he and his family needs, so he invests the surplus in a small business. Due to hard work and shrewd dealing, the ant's company grows into a profitable business.

The grasshopper continues to turn in ten hours a day at Wal-mart.

After thirty years of comfortable middle class existence, the ant sells the company to a large conglomerate, and retires.

The conglomerate immediately fires all the ant's employees and outsources their jobs to India.

The ant's former employees join the grasshopper at Wal-mart.

With the added revenue from outsourcing and downsizing the ant's company, the conglomerate is able to purchase even more politicians who will work hard against peace, unions, the environment, the poor, the middle class, and anything that might inhibit the corporate bottom line.

The grasshopper and the ant's former employees demand that Wal-mart pay them for overtime but are told they are exempt -- because they are 'managers.' The case makes it to the Supreme Court, where Reagan and Bush appointees rule in favor of Wal-mart, admonishing the plaintiffs to 'go home and feel lucky to even have jobs, what with all the outsourcing going on these days.'

The conglomerate also buys CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS and many radio stations and news periodicals to keep the ants and grasshoppers from knowing how dramatically the deck has been stacked against them. And with demagogic politicians and the media in its pocket, the conglomerate finds it very easy to keep the ants and grasshoppers from uniting to demand justice by pitting them against each other with stories of lazy, irresponsible grasshoppers living off of industrious, sober-minded ants.

Moral of the Story: Think critically -- and be very careful how you vote in 2008.