ants_and_grasshoppers Dafremen If you spend your days planning for each new tomorrow, the only day you'll have left for YOU, will be your last. Since you have no idea which today that happens to be, you'll waste it away planning for another tomorrow, but this time a tomorrow that your todays will never see. On the other hand, anyone that thinks tomorrow doesn't exist because it hasn't come yet, is a damned fool. To live life head-on? To plan and prepare for every detail? What makes sense? Ant or grasshopper? Let's break the story down and see what the consequences of both lifestyles might be able to tell us: Grasshopper fiddles away the summer, and winds up starving come winter time. Ants work all year storing up food, and consequently, survive comfortably through the winter months. Seems like a pretty straightforward answer now, doesn't it? Seems like planning ahead and preparing for the future win out in the end, but does that REALLY represent an ACCURATE picture of the winners and the losers? I mean, let's say that an ant died tomorrow, what would be the last thing he'd probably see? The inside of a dirt hole or some other ant's ass, probably. The grasshopper on the other hand, he's seen it all, man. He'll go out in a kamikaze blaze of glory on my windshield (ensuring a fitting memorial for at least a week or two with the way my wipers work.) Maybe he'll die in a daring chase with a hungry bird or, hell, just watching the sun go down from the top of a tall blade of grass. Does lugging stuff around that weighs more than you do, all day, sound like the way you would want to spend what might be the only life you get? Day after day, EVERY DAY, FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. Well except for wintertime. In wintertime, you and your buddies hole up eating the food that you've been saving, shooting the breeze about all of the things that have been going on in your lives. "Wow. This is good food, huh?" "Yea..sure is good." "Is that YOU Neal?" "Yea. Joe?" "Yea. Hey, I THOUGHT I recognized that ass. How's it going Neal? Watcha been up to?" "Not much man, you know, the usual, sniffin' tail and hauling sh*t 6 to 6 like everybody else. You?" "Same."(Sigh) (Sigh) "Well..only three more months to go." "Yep. Just three more. Sure is good food though, huh?" "Yea..sure is good." So they survived, but at what cost? (Why none at all, of course, but at what loss of potential benefit?) I think I'm starting to see one area where the story that we're told falls askew of the reality of the situation that it attempts to present. We are told that the ants are good because they work hard, denying themselves pleasure today in return for future reward. ( (Double take) Hey! Isn't that the Puritan creed?) So what are the ants for watching the grasshopper die come winter time? They had it within their power to spare his life, instead they chose to watch him "get what he had coming to him." Why not choose to help? (This assumes, of course, that the ants are not interested in eating or attacking the grasshopper in any way. Didn't they have all summer to do that? In the story, they yak with the grasshopper a bit, so I'm assuming a benign, personified little ant, with so-so grammar.) The ants couldn't help the grasshopper because saving the grasshopper had NOT been planned for. They had spent their entire lives planning and working for the future. How could they turn their backs on the grasshopper? He simply wasn't part of the plan, that's how. Any deviation from the plan could be catastrophic to the ants' way of thinking. I suppose that doesn't really make them BAD ants, but it sure doesn't do much to improve my opinion of the cold-hearted little workaholic bastards either. If they hadn't given up their ability or their willingness to live in the moment once in awhile, here's how a little sidetrack from their months of planning could have changed the story. It's a little sidetrack that I like to call: DANCE_GRASSHOPPER_DANCE 021008 ... flippo you forgot to blather the story first dunderbrain! 021008 ... anonymous coward . 040807 what's it to you? who go blather from