As the World Turns......
ORIGINAL VERSION :
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long,
building his house and laying up supplies for 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.
MODERN AMERICAN VERSION :
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 NAAGB (The National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on the Nightline and charges the ant with "green bias," and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenish. 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 80s.
Ted Kennedy 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 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 appointed from a list of single-parent welfare moms who can only hear cases on Thursdays between 1:30 and 3pm when there are not talk shows scheduled. 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 disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill Clinton standing before a wildly, applauding group of Democrats announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America
Modern Version of Old Fable
(Author Unknown)
(Click on the rose to go Home)
Accept me as I am - I have no guarantee. A claim to perfection I have not. Perfect I cannot be. I, like you.....am human. Prone to make mistakes. Failure is not a character flaw, Just a part of the human makeup. I live, I laugh and I also learn. My knowledge is incomplete. I am searching all the time, in waking hours as well as sleep. I have a long road to travel, as well as you do. We learn our lessons on the way. Wisdom we shall acrue. Accept me as I am Because I am ....me. And You are you. No one like me in the world. That is my only guarantee.
"Scatter seeds of kindness
everywhere you go.
Scatter bits of courtesy -
Watch them grow and grow.
Gather buds of friendship,
Keep them till full-blown,
You will find more happiness
Than you have ever known."
By Amy R. Raabe
