I am the grasshopper

I'm sure you know the Aesop fable about the ant and the grasshopper, wherein the grasshopper spends the whole summer playing while the ant works diligently to put stores away for the impending season.  I was reminded of this recently when a friend was telling me all of the work she was doing to get her house ready for winter, while I spent every available hour lounging by the pool without a care in the world.

I thought it would be kind of cool to write about that conversation and use a video of the fable to illustrate the contrast between our attitudes about what summer is all about.  Well, I have to say most of the youtube videos on the topic are pretty lame; the only hopeful one seemed to be a Walt  Disney Silly Symphony from 1934 but that was just a little too dated and involved way too much spitting.

Then, as luck would have it, I stumbled upon a short piece that not only made the point about the grasshopper's laziness compared to the ant's industriousness, but it also puts the whole fable into a context that's relevant to the current times - it's perfect!  Here it is for you to enjoy and to learn the moral (I'll leave it to you to determine just what that is):

It's a comforting thought to me that although I frittered the summer away sitting by the pool drinking beer and getting an all over tan, I really don't have to worry about freezing to death this winter because I, unlike the ant, have a pretty decent government pension to fall back on.  I may be lazy, but I ain't broke and I never will be unless Congress manages to bring the whole federal government to its knees through political mismanagement of its financing.  The scary thing is, that seems like a real possibility right now.

But hey, we grasshoppers will deal with that when the time comes - until then, it's time to make music and play because, you know, that's what we do, dude!