The Fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper

    As a child we have all been told of the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. It tells the story of a grasshopper that has spent the warm months singing while the ant worked to store up food for the rainy days. When the rains came, the grasshopper finds itself hungry and begs the ant for food. The grasshopper is rebuked for its idleness and told to suffer the consequence of its improvidence. We were told that the fable gives us an ambivalent moral lesson about the virtues of hard work and planning for our future.

    If you ask me, I think the story is half done. If you grew up and live all your life in the Philippines, as I do, where floods brought about by torrential rains, storm surges, high tides, tidal waves and tsunamis is an in-your-face experience every year without fail you'd come to expect that when "rain" is mentioned in a story it will definitely be followed by a harrowing or hilarious "flood" story. And failing that a "rain" story seems incomplete without the "flood" part. And thus, I submit that when the rains came in the story, the ant's colony could have been flooded and as a result the ant drowned. As for the stored food, in all likelihood it would have been washed away and ended up as flotsam in the rising floodwaters-- easy picking for the hungry grasshopper.

    There is no moral lesson to be learned here. If there is anything at all to be learned it is that there are two kinds of people:-- grasshoppers and ants.

    Ants are the hard-working people who work all their life in the hope that the future would be better. Grasshoppers, on the other hand, are people to whom good things come without much effort on their part.

    Though I'm eternally gratefull for the things that have come my way I can't say that I got them with ease. I've fought and worked hard for every bit of scrap I have and so if indeed there are but two kinds of people-- then I'm probably an ant.

    Oh, one last thing since ants are scavengers the stockfile of food in the story could be-- dead grasshoppers!

    Think about that for a moment.