This is my favorite email of the week. And with the 2008 Presidential election right around the corner, this story has two great lessons we should all definitely remember!
Awsop's Favle told and retold.....
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 & 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 former employer, the Rose Law Firm, to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a jury comprised 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.
Today is Vertical Day! To learn more, go to:
http://www.mikehuckabee.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=VerticalDay.Home&l=0A8242CD3D2CBFD6D6C0957CD339A949
Posted by: Peter | September 25, 2007 at 11:06 AM
Time to stand up for freedom and defend her with all your might:
http://tshirtinsurgency.com/node/41
Posted by: matthew | November 06, 2007 at 08:13 AM
Got to love that Ant, he's a real Socialist! Lives in an ant-hill, contributes to the well being of the hill, not like that selfish Libertarian grass-hopper! Yes, bees and ants are the very model of socialism!
Posted by: Dutchman | December 06, 2007 at 11:14 PM
Translation: Hardworking white people are ruined by the lazy, blood-sucking black people, who are eventually murdered by a gang of violent Hispanics.
Posted by: Paul | February 09, 2008 at 01:07 AM
Like Ben Franklin said, "they who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security. http://www.bostonteapartybook.com
Posted by: IloveIRS | April 18, 2008 at 07:59 AM
What You Should Have Learned in Ant History Class But Apparently Didn't
Modern Ant history begins around 2,000 years ago, when Alfred Ant was crucified on an Ant Cross, so that all bugs would have everlasting life. As Ant Churches organized around the world, Ants found it to be their calling to convert every bug in the World to Antology by any means necessary. Unfortunately, Ant Kings and Queens were the heads of the early Ant churches, and they launched Ant Crusades around the globe, to convert the heathen bugs. If they brought back ships full of gold and treasure, that was a bonus. Ants were smart and industrious, and they developed stingers that were much more technologically advanced than the defenses of other bugs. The Ant explorer Hern-ant-o Cortezzzz reached the Beetle civilization in South America, where his band of 500 Ants and 16 Spiders (on which the Ants rode in battle) mercilessly slaughtered the whole Beetle empire in the name of Alfred. His King was quite pleased with the booty the explorers brought back home.
As regular Ants began to tire of Royal control of the Church, Mart-ant Luther spun off a new version, where there was no middleman. Those who practiced this Protest-Ant-Ism were persecuted severely. Some of them decided to sail to a new world, where they could practice their new religion freely. They met the native people of this new world, and got along rather nicely, since there were no zoning laws, and plenty of room to settle.
Eventually, the Ants got tired of sending their taxes back to Engl-Ant, so they decided to revolt. There's nothing in the world Ants hate more than taxes.
The founding Ants realized that for this new Anthill to work, it would require a Constitution, guaranteeing all bugs equal rights. They also realized that religion could not be a part of government, like it had been in the Old World…what would the point have been if they just created the same problem all over again?
Ants think of themselves as hard workers, but they thought it would be a great idea to send ships over to Grasshopper Island, and bring back a bunch of Grasshoppers as slave labor. Since Grasshoppers are considered less Bugly than Ants, it was thought of as the natural order of things. As the fruits of Grasshopper labor lined Ant pockets, the Ants began the first Real Estate Boom of our time. They expanded Westward, murdering every native bug around, and taking their lands as their own. The more “civilized” native bugs were placed on “reservations” so as not to pollute the ant community. As the Ants made more and more money, they invested it back into their own Ant families, educating their offspring at institutions of Higher Learning.
Ants who had a conscience began to struggle with the moral question of bug equality, while their nation condoned bug slavery. The Republic-Ant leader abolished the practice, and Ant went to war against ant, with hundreds of thousands killed.
Fast forward, to the turn of the century. Cockroaches begin to appear on the landscape. Cockroaches are legal entities that are entitled to the same rights as Ants, but with none of the legal responsibilities. Some are more responsible than others. Some begin to exploit their powers and harm the bugs that made their lives possible. They monopolize the Honey industry. They collude together to fix prices. They exploited child ants, making them work in sweatshops, for 16 hours a day.
Meanwhile, the formerly enslaved, uneducated Grasshoppers have been released into the world, expected to fend for themselves. They own no property. They are forced to use separate bug facilities, and not allowed to mingle with Ants. "Uppity" Grasshoppers are lynched for questioning the status quo. Ants won’t give them jobs.
Religious Ants got the idea they could control other Ants’ behavior, and began to ban things like alcohol and buggery. Google “buggery” some time. They began to control the curriculum of their local schools, indoctrinating their Ant kids into an Ant-I-Social mindset, where anyone who doesn’t act like an Ant should is someone to be feared and hated.
When the Cockroach activities of the early decade resulted in the Great Ant Depression, Ants worked harder than ever, and their pride soared. Surely the Ant God loved the US of Ants. The Ants told their people that the USA was perfect, the chosen country. They waved flags, and sang patriotic songs. Another bug nation, that thought it was the perfect chosen country, had a bug leader who got his bugs up in an even more patriotic nationalistic frenzy, and they began aggressively attacking other bug nations. The Ants and Roaches in charge realized that they had better squash the competition quickly. The Roaches’ companies sold their war products to the USA, and with cooperation and determination, they beat back the Axis of Evil.
National pride was at an all time high, and now all the ants coming back from the war had nothing to do. Some busybody Ants managed to have “Under God” inserted into the Ant Pledge of Allegiance. They began to describe the USA as an Alfred Nation, even though their Ant Fathers had set out to keep religion and government separate. The Conserv-Ant-ives started re-writing Ant history, and propagandizing its population.
That’s also about when Roaches learned how to make the Ants want their products, and the US of Ants began producing a lot of goods. The standard of living was pretty darn good, across the country. Heck, the Chief Executive Roach barely made 4 times what his lowest ant made. Most Ants weren’t yet college educated. Yet the Ant nation thrived. It created new industries, and was the shining example of world capitalism. The Ants and Roaches in charge realized that without a war, they would have to take some money from all the Ants. They taxed the income of ants. But they also realized that taxes were something Ants hated, so they needed to create a diversion.
If the Ant population was scared of some common enemy, they wouldn’t be thinking about their tax dollars disappearing. There were plenty to go around. Buggers, druggers, anyone not conformist enough, they became the enemy. And Grasshoppers, of course. The Ants in Charge told the Ants that Grasshoppers were lazy, and they wanted to live on welfare sucked from their own hard work. Of course, Grasshoppers were just as hard workers as ants. Anyone who questioned the fairness of their system was labeled with the worst insult of them all…LIBERAL. The liberal’s first cousin was called a Communist. And it just so happened that the second most powerful bug-state in the world was the Dragonflies. They were the same color as the Ants, but they didn’t believe in the Ant God, or really any God for that matter. So they spent decades convincing the Ant population that the Dragonfly Nation was bent on Ant destruction. They funneled billions of Ant dollars into Roach defense industries. They told the common ants that saving was a virtue, while they ran up the national debt, deferring a horrible legacy to their Ant heirs.
While the Ant nation was distracted with trembling fear of nuclear annihilation, the Roaches had their Ant Special Forces, and the Central Ant-elligence Agency infiltrate smaller bug nations, and overthrow their democratically elected leadership, installing puppet dictators that would line their Roach pockets. The citizens of these smaller bug nations resented the interference, but the US of Ants was too strong to stand up to.
When honey was discovered in abundance in a Ladybug Desert, the Ants found a way to control the governments there too. The ants let ruthless Ladybug dictators oppress their bugs at will, as long as the Honey pipelines flowed. Those oppressed Ladybugs didn’t have such a kind view of Uncle Ant.
On the home front, the Roaches bought up all the TV and Radio outlets, and had the Ants in Charge sell the story that the media was owned by Grasshoppers. They showed Grasshoppers wreaking havoc in the Ant community, although it was usually Grasshopper on Grasshopper. Grasshoppers became objects of fear. One should protect one’s wallet whenever one is spotted. The Ants in charge also found that Grasshoppers liked a little Grass, which became a convenient way to put them behind bars. More than 50% of male Grasshoppers are under incarceration. One War-Hawkish ant even bought drugs from a foreign bug-nation to finance his other war project, and had the drugs sent into a poor Ant neighborhood.
Ants didn’t even notice that its national wealth had been draining into the coffers of the Roaches. The Ant Leaders had cut the Roach Capital Gains Tax to less than half of what the average Ant paid. Roach businesses were granted tax “incentives” that meant the tax burden was again shifted to the Ants, but again, they were told that was good business. As their profits continued to increase, the Roaches got even hungrier. They figured that since an American Ant was unionized, and thus overpaid, then they should have some Ant-Onesian from a country with no natural resources make the product for 13 cents an hour. The poor bug from the third world would appreciate their generosity. He would then sell his Ant-Onesian gadgets at Roach-Mart for $19.95, which made the Ants very happy, to be able to buy things so cheaply.
However, the less educated Ants who used to make a good living making things, now had nothing to make. The Ant pundits again chided them for being such lazy, good for nothing Ants.
Then one day, the Ants elected the dimmest Ant of them all to be their leader. He surrounded himself with Roaches, and Ant Pundits, and they got the hate machine rolling. Some oppressed Ladybugs from one of the countries where his buddies were in charge blew up a big anthill, causing many deaths, and a sense of national anger. Nobody could understand why they hated Ants for their freedom. They needed some revenge, quick. His dimness realized that he couldn’t attack his buddies, so he re-focused the anger on a helpless ladybug nation led by another one of his country’s installed dictators. It was all very therapeutic for the nation of Ants, until they began to realize, one by one, that things were not quite what they had been told. The Roaches stood in line for Honey and Money.
Then, a slap in the face of reality. The pendulum of conserve-ant-ism reached its end, ready to swing back in the other direction. A bug who was the son of an Ant and a Grasshopper symbolized that change. Of course the Media machine tried to stem the tide, with its poorly spelled email slurs, and baseless accusations that he was a sleeper Ladybug. But the Conserv-Ant-ives had cried Wolf once too often. The Ant Nation was tired. Thus began the golden age of Ant culture. It had a long way to go.
Be careful how you vote indeed.
Posted by: Kyle | June 23, 2008 at 05:19 PM
Typical liberal... re-writing history to make it fit their 'America-hating' and 'blame corporate America' agenda.
Just remember, without the roaches, neither ants nor grasshoppers would have jobs. And when you punish roaches for their success by taxing them to death, they can't afford to hire/give raises to ants and grasshoppers.
Posted by: BlogForFreedom | June 30, 2008 at 12:07 PM
yes, BFF, all hail the mighty corporation to whom we are all so deeply indebted. The 'you hate America' line is a bit tired, and the refuge of those who grow weary of reasoned discussion...
Posted by: humblywalkin | July 07, 2008 at 06:49 AM
The Republican Party has lost its way. Protection of individual liberties, small government are hallmarks of conservatives still, but Republicans no longer. If you want to be true to your conservative values, consider Bob Barr this November: www.BobBarr2008.com
If you want to continue the interventionist, government-expansion, privacy-instusion, deficit-ballooning policies of two Bush terms, go ahead and vote for McCain for more of the same.
Posted by: truefreedom | July 07, 2008 at 06:57 AM
Liberals and conservatives are both full of it. Neither ant-story is a faithful replication of America. There are small bits of truth in both, as well as big fat lies in both. What we need is a relevant third party to emerge to get this country back on track.
Posted by: Red | August 27, 2008 at 09:17 AM