KINGDOM OF THE LOCUST
With an apology to Aesop
Once upon a time there was a pleasant meadow in a lovely valley.
A colony of ants came to the meadow and saw that the land was good and with work would provide for a lovely place to live for them and their children.
They worked hard and put away food for the winter and cared for the land.
From a neighboring valley a tribe of locusts came to the land of the ants and decided to stay because the meadow was so pleasant and fertile.
The ants welcomed them in as neighbors and soon they all decided that they should form a government and each ant and locust would get an equal vote in the affairs of the meadow.
Some of the locusts came to the ants and said they were poor and in need. Being of kind heart the ants voted to share the fruits of their hard work with the locusts.
Being locusts, they did what locusts are prone to do, that is create lots of little locusts and sit in their burrows eating the food produced by the ants and watching their flat screen televisions paid for by the ants.
In time they discovered, as the little locusts grew up to vote, that they now outnumbered the ants and could vote themselves more and more of what the ants were working so hard to produce.
More and more locusts had baby locusts and invited their relatives and kin in from neighboring meadows.
One by one the ants figured out that they were doing all the work and the locusts were doing all the eating and loafing and watching television.
The ants decided that they did not want to continue to provide for an ever increasing number of locusts who did little to provide for themselves.
The ants packed up and left the now ravaged meadow and moved away to another meadow in another valley.
Winter came to the meadow of the abandoned locusts. The locusts starved and froze because there was no longer any ants to provide for them what they refused to provide for themselves.
And the shadow of darkness fell over the formerly pleasant meadow in the formerly lovely valley.
End of story. If you are an ant you know the moral of the story. If you are a locust you don’t care if there is a moral; you just want to know where the ants went.
Bob Bandy
