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The Legend of The Ant and The Grasshopper
The Original Legend
An ant and a grasshopper live in the same
field. During the summer, the ant works hard all day and night bringing
in supplies for the winter and he preserves his home to keep him warm during
the cold winter months ahead. Meanwhile the grasshopper hops and sings
and eats all the grass he wants and procreates.
Come winter, the grass dies and its bitterly
cold. The ant is well fed and warm in his home, but the grasshopper has
not prepared for the winter, so he dies, leaving a whole hord 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 South African version
The first part is the same, but because
it happens in South 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 right next door they are living in terrible conditions without
food or proper clothing. A T.V crew shows up and broadcasts footage of
the poor grasshoppers, contrasting this with footage of the ant snug in
his home with plenty of food. The world wide public are stunned.
So how can it be that in this beautiful
field, that the little grasshoppers are allowed to suffer so, while the
ant lives in the lap of luxury?
In the blink of an eye, SAGU (South African
Grasshoppers Union) is formed. They charge the ants with "species bias"
and claim that the grasshoppers are victims of 30 million years of green
oppression. They stage a protest in front of the ants house and trash the
street. The T.V. Crew interview them and they all state that if their demands
are not met, they will all be forced into a life of crime. Just for practice,
they loot the T.V.Crew's luggage and hijack their van.
The TRC (Take and Re-distribution Committee)
justified their behaviour saying that this is the legacy of the ants discrimination
towards and oppression of the grasshoppers. They demand that the ant apologise
to the grasshoppers for what he has done and that he make amends for all
the ants in history who have done the same thing to the grasshopper.PAGAD
(People against Grasshopper Abuse and Distress) state that they are staging
a holy war against the ants.
The President appears on the 8 o clock
news and says that he will do everything for the grasshoppers, who have
been denied the property that they deserve, by those who benefited unfairly
during the summer. The government drafted the EEGAD ( Economic Equity for
Greens and Disadvantaged) act retrospective to the beginning of summer.
The ant is
fined for failing to empoly a proportionate
number of green insects and having nothing left to pay back taxes, his
home is confiscated by the government for re-distribution.
The story ends as we see a grasshopper
finishing off the last of the ants food while the government house he's
in(which just happens to be the ants old house) crumbles around him because
he doesn't know how to maintain it.
Showing on TV (which he and a couple of
friends stole from another ant) the president is standing before a group
of wildly singing and dancing grasshoppers announcing that the new era
of "equality" has dawned on the field.
The ant, meanwhile, is not allowed to work
because he has historically benifited from the field. In his place, ten
grasshoppers have been appointed to harvest the grass for winter, but the
grasshoppers only work 2 hours a day and steal half of what they harvest.
When winter comes again and not enough
food has been harvested, they strike and demand a 150% increase so that
they can buy food, which now has to be imported because the grasshoppers
are not productive enough to produce enough food locally.
The ant packs his things and emigrates
to another field, where he starts a highly successful food company and
becomes a millionaire by selling food to the field where he comes from.
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