[Rhodes22-list] THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

[Paul Grandholm]

CLASSIC 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. The
grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out
 in the cold.

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 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 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 less
fortunate are cold and starving.

CBS, NBC 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."

Al Gore 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-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 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.

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.



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Paul Grandholm
C&H Technology
GrandPower Components Div.
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