LETTERS: THE MODERN VERSION OF AN OLD PARABLE

To the editor:

(With credit to Elgar Macey):

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's 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, CNN, NBC and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.

America and the world are stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that, in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Then a representative of the NAAGB (National Association of Green Bugs) shows up on "Nightline" and charges the ant with green bias and makes the case that the grasshopper is the victim of 30 million years of greenism.

Kermit the Frog appears on "oprah" with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when he sings "It's Not Easy Being Green." Bill and Hillary clinton make a special guest appearance on "CBS Evening News" to tell a concerned Dan Rather that they will do everything they can for the grasshopper who has been denied the prosperity he deserves by those who benefited unfairly during the Reagan summers, or, as Bill refers to it, the "Temperatures of the '80s."

Richard Gephardt exclaims in an interview with Peter Jennings that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equality and Anti-Greenism 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.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits 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 since he doesn't know how to maintain it. The ant has disappeared in the snow. And on the TV, which the grasshopper bought by selling most of the ant's food, they are showing Bill clinton standing before a wildly applauding group of compatriots announcing that a new era of "fairness" has dawned in America.

ROBERT A. CRON

Cape Girardeau