Humour
The Legend Of The Ant And The Grasshopper
An ant and a grasshopper live in the same field. During the summer the ant works all day and night bringing in supplies for the winter and he prepares his home to keep him warm during the cold winter months ahead. Meanwhile, the grasshopper hops and sings, eats all the grass he wants and makes merry.
Come winter, the grass dies, it is bitterly cold. The ant is well fed and warm in his house, but the grasshopper has not prepared for the winter, so he dies, leaving a whole hoard of little grasshoppers without food or shelter.
The moral of the story is that one should work hard to ensure that you can take care of yourself.
The African Version...
The first part is the same, but because it happens in Africa there are a few complications. The starving, shivering offspring of the grasshopper demand to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed, while next door they are living in terrible conditions without food or proper clothing. A TV crew shows up and broadcasts footage of the poor grasshoppers, contrasting this with footage of the ant, snug in his comfortable home with a pantry full of food.
The public is stunned. How can this be, in this beautiful field, that the poor grasshoppers are allowed to suffer so, while the ant lives in the lap of luxury. In the blink of an eye AGU (African Grasshopper Union) is formed. They charge the ant with Aspecies Bias and claim that grasshoppers are the victim of 30 million years of green oppression. They stage a protest in front of the ant's house and trash the street. The TV crew interviews them, and they all state that if their demands are not met they will be forced into a life of crime.
Just for practice, they loot the TV crew's luggage and hijack their van. The TRC (Take and Redistribute Commission) justifies their behaviour by saying that this is the legacy of the ant's discrimination towards the oppression of the grasshoppers. They demand that the ant apologises to the grasshoppers for what he has done, and that he makes amends for all the other ants in history who had done the same thing to the grasshoppers.
PAGAD (People Against Grasshopper Abuse and Distress) state that they are starting a holy war, against ants. The president appears on the eight o'clock news and says that he will do everything he can for the grasshoppers who have been denied the prosperity they deserve by those who have benefited unfairly during the summer. The government drafts up the EEGAD (Economic Equity for Greens and Disadvantaged) act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. The ant is fined for failing to employ a proportionate number of green insects and having nothing left to pay his back-taxes, his home is confiscated by the government for redistribution.
The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing off the last 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 because he does not know how to maintain it. Showing on the TV (which he and a couple of his friends stole from another ant) the president is standing before a group of wildly singing and dancing grasshoppers announcing that a new era of Equality has dawned on the field.
The ant, meanwhile is not allowed to work because he has historically benefited from the field. In his place, ten grasshoppers only work two hours a day and steal half of what they actually harvest. When winter comes again and not enough food has been harvested, they strike and demand a 150 percent increase in their wages so that they can buy more food, which has now been imported because the grasshoppers are not productive enough to produce enough food legally. The ant packs his things and moves to another field, where he starts a highly successful food company and becomes a millionaire by selling food to the field from where he came.
