But like all things on the Internet, the story sometimes gets updated and revised. In a recent email I received the original story is the same but the new liberal version has the following:

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is 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 warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.

News networks CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears on Oprah with the grasshopper, and everybody cries when they sing, "It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Jesse Jackson stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the group singing, "We shall overcome.” Jesse then has the group kneel down to pray to God for the grasshopper’s sake.

Nancy Pelosi & John Kerry exclaim in an interview with Larry King that the ant has gotten rich off the back of the grasshopper, and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts the Economic Equity and Anti-Grasshopper 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.

Hillary gets her old law firm to represent the grasshopper in a defamation suit against the ant, and the case is tried before a panel of federal judges that Bill Clinton appointed from a list of single-parent welfare recipients.

The ant loses the case.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around him because he doesn’t maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident and the house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the once peaceful neighborhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY: Be careful how you vote. [or Vote Republican]

A Race In The Workplace reader took exception to the racism in the version above whining about:

As I’m reading this my boss is standing over my shoulder giggling, waiting for me to break into laughter. But the more I read the more uncomfortable I felt. When I finished I told her that I guessed this was a Republican joke so I just didn’t get it. My white, upper middle-class, polo playing, polo pony owning, Louis Vuitton bag carrying boss is a major Republican. There is an on-going "light” jest regarding our differing political affiliations as I am a loyal progressive. A 24 year-old upper-middle class black woman myself (albeit without the Polo or Vuitton) I found this joke very offensive. I felt there were a lot of racial implications, especially once Jesse Jackson and Oprah were drug into the mess. The whole premise wreaked of the conservative philosophy that all poor people are poor just because they’re lazy. The joke completely ignores major issues like racial bias, white privilege, male gatekeepers, and generations of inequity. I just thought the whole thing was really crass, and typically Republican.

You will notice that she never once said that Jesse Jackson would never do this, or that the statements about Democrats were untrue. The reason this is funny and offensive to Democrats is because the whole story rings of truth. If it were not dead on accurate, it certainly would not be funny.

There is no racism, if the statement is true. If I say that the majority of all terror attacks in the world are committed by Muslims, it is not racist, it is not Islamophobic, nor is it bigoted. Know why? Because it is merely reporting factual information.

What this poor fool of a woman does not realize is that everything in the Liberal version of the story has already happened in real life. This is not an allegory of what might happen to the ant in a maybe future fantasy world. This has already happened to victims of liberalism in the United States and is still happening to poor unfortunates who work hard, save, scrimp and contribute to America only to have it stolen from them and handed to those who feel the world owes them a living.

So, grasshopper, if you are offended about anything in the story, be offended at what we have done to all the ants in this country.

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