Parable Humor

[Fuzzykitten99]

I did not write this myself. Credit goes to a poster on another board I frequent. But the point of the text is what is important.

A little parable humor-

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The Ant and The Grasshopper

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 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 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.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote

[AFPheonix]

Something tells me the moral is not really about being careful how you vote, but is thinly veiled racism.

[Boozy]

Not all poor people are lazy drug addicts.

There are several members on this board who are one or two paychecks or setbacks away from being cold this winter (see our poverty thread), and I know for a fact that they work every bit as hard as anyone else.

[Greenday]

The story does show a good example, though, of how a decent amount of lower class, low-middle, whine about how the rich have too much money and it's unfair. And there are a few decent amount of lazy people who do nothing but whine instead of actually trying to give themselves a leg-up in the world. Everyone always says tax the rich more because they have so much more money. But what about the people who took nothing and made a lot of money doing hard-work. After all that hard-work, why the hell should they have have to pay such higher, ridiculous taxes for the money the actually earned? I myself believe it's crap when people are rich by a matter of family, but for those people who earn their money themselves, they shouldn't be so screwed over.

[rahmota]

Hmmm. Welll I'd have to say that the parable does sound like a thinly vield insult to poor people of all races to me as well.

And yes there are both good and bad people of many social levels. However it seems to me that the more time people spend at the upper social levels the more they become what they may have once hated and dreaded becoming.

Its not just about how hard you work but the system is not set up fairly. Work hard keep your nose clean and still die poor, broke and unlucky.

I think my views have already been explained on the poverty threads and all.

Capitalism is unfair, immoral and oppressive.

[Greenday]

Capitalism doesn't suck as badly as you make it out to be. The problem is America's capitalism is broken. If it weren't for all the corrupted people, it'd work out pretty well.

[AFPheonix]

Hmmm. Welll I'd have to say that the parable does sound like a thinly vield insult to poor people of all races to me as well.

...except that it mentions Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, two men who are not really known for championing causes other than ones that concern blacks....

[CancelMyService]

I don't see how you can even call it "thinly veiled", they might as well end it with "BTW BY GRASSHOPPER WE MEAN LAZY N-WORDS". How anyone can see this as anything but passive-aggressive racist BS is beyond me.

It really strikes a chord with me when poor people of any persuasion are painted as lazy, as if anyone can just go out and become a millionaire and the socio-economic balance of society didn't stack the deck right out of the box. Wasn't it MLK who said how can you pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you can't afford boots?

[Seshat]

I'm not terribly familiar with the personalities described - I know vaguely who they are, but in no great detail. Even without knowing the personalities, the parable is heavily biased and stereotyped.

However, it makes a valid point. Unfortunately, it overplays its valid point and crashes all over valid cases where welfare is needed, and implies the non-existence of working poor (which we all know to be ludicrous - working poor do exist).

Beyond the criticism of the parable, however, I think my opinions on poverty have been clearly stated in the poverty thread.

As for my opinion of capitalism: unrestrained capitalism permits unrestrained greed and a lack of social conscience. Restrained capitalism, or a variant of capitalism where businesses & corporate entities took the concerns of all their stakeholders into account & played fair by everyone, might be worth a try. I'm using the term 'stakeholders' to mean shareholders, customers, suppliers, staff, neighbours, and anyone I've forgotten who is affected by the business.

[rahmota]

Ok sorry I forgot to include "/sarcasm" tags around the words thinly veiled. Yeah it is rather derogatory and targetted at blacks. But I've also heard such comments made at mexicans and others who are not deserving of it.

Greenday: Pure unrestrained capitalism is one of the worst evil systems humanity has ever developed. America's capitalist system is not broken it is flawed and tainted from the very roots. But thats for another thread.

[Boozy]

I have a little more time to respond to this now, so here goes.

Capitalism is "fair" only in societies that provide a level playing field from birth. Capitalism would work very well if everyone was born with equal opportunities.

We know, of course, that this is not the case. A child born into poverty in a crime-ridden neighbourhood with poorly funded schools does not have the same opportunities as the child born in an upper-class family with money and access to good schools. Financial success will be infinitely harder to come by for the former than for the latter. Even the smartest and most determined individual needs a break.

The government generally steps in and regulates capitalism to give everyone a chance. Its common sense and its for the common good. One day the children of my country's welfare and social programs will be working for our economy, voting for our government representatives, and possible wiping our elderly bed-ridden behinds.

A society is only as strong as the weakest among them. Railing against all social programs because you don't like that they help a few people you feel are undeserving is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Unfortunately, the Republican marketing machine has been screaming "social programs mean big government!" for so long that no one is using their heads anymore.

[Seshat]

In Australia, the public school system is organised on a state-by-state basis. We don't have small 'school districts' such that a school in wealthy suburbs is good and a school in poor suburbs is starved of funding.

Admittedly, a school in wealthy suburbs can fund-raise more easily for the luxuries, so its children are going to have a larger stock of loan instruments for its school band and better school excursions, and suchlike. But the teaching standards are common state-wide, the curriculum is the same state-wide, the buildings and grounds are maintained out of a common budget, and so on.

We probably have fewer administrative costs for this state-wide system than the US has for its district-based schooling. So much for 'big government'.

University access is based on your educational standard - the grades you received out of high school. If you're a few years out of school, you can sit a test instead. If you (or if you're young, your parents) are below a certain income level, you can get a pension to live on while you're studying. The pension is limited to your first degree, and you have to maintain an educational standard to continue to receive it, but it makes university accessible to the poor.

Those of us who go through the university system get a small percentage of loading on our tax to defray some of the cost of our university, but only in years when our taxable income is higher than some figure or other, and only until we've repaid a set amount.

This doesn't provide a level playing field for everyone, but it reduces the slant somewhat. I'm a child of the working poor, but one whose family believes in education. If not for the educational funding and public library system, my brother and I would not have had the good start we did. I'm grateful to the system, and just managed to finish repaying my 'university loan', the year before last.

I know the children of wealthier families had advantages I don't - I worked for a private school for a while, and the facilities those children had were way greater than the public school system provides. But my schools could have been a lot worse.

However, those children from families that don't support them studying, or families which actively discourage them, aren't ever going to have an equal chance. They'll have a lot of catching up to do as adults. I don't think society can do anything about that (when it's not a child-welfare issue) without breaching individual rights.