I don’t remember who sent this to me, but thanks! (This column is going up Thursday morning, and I am getting on a plane soon, with my wife, and we’re going to Florida for a week. My 76th birthday was yesterday, the 17th, and we’re outa here. So, till February 25th, you’ll have to call my son or daughter for service). :Last column till 2/25.
OLD VERSION
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and storing up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool, and laughs, dances, and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter and dies out in the cold. MORAL? Be responsible for yourself!
MODERN VERSION
The ant works hard all summer, storing up food and supplies for the winter. Come winter, he is well fed and warm. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool, laughs, dances, and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering, hungry 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, ABC, and CNN (Not Fox News) show up to provide pictures of the starving, 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 with so much wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everyone cries when they sing, “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”
ACORN stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house, and news stations film the group singing “We Shall Overcome.” Rev. Jeremiah Wright has the group kneel down and 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 of the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on all ants, to make them pay their fair share. 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 with, 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 didn’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, once peaceful, neighborhood.
P.S. If you have ever seen North or West Philly, the story fits to a tee, with humans rather than insects playing the parts. St. Louis, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington D.C., Detroit, and most big cities fill the bill completely. The welfare system, Medicare, Social Security, et al, which got started with FDR, has gotten so big, that it has bankrupted America with debts to huge, as to be payable only in paper scrip. The work ethic has disappeared, and the world is full of human grasshoppers. Once proud nations such as Spain, Greece, Portugal, Japan, and Britain are also suffering at the hands of welfare statism and un-payable debt. Will the world’s paper money system collapse? Gold and silver will always be money, no matter what happens. Gotterdammerung