Grasshopper Starves...

If you’ve been following THE HARE thus far, you might think that we have a mandatory hatred for Aesop. Well, we don’t. In fact, we don’t have a mandatory hatred for anything. One of our prime beliefs is that every act, situation or event, should be approached with a clear mind and without bias. We apply these principles to all walks of life, hence our rather ambiguous, and often contradictory, political stance. If we have a permanent stance at all, it is in support of rational, and its application to all things in order to reach a reasoned and logical conclusion uninfluenced by our past decisions or opinions.

And so this week, Aesop gets a huge thumbs-up for his tale; The Ant and the Grasshopper.

The fable runs thusly: there is a colony of ants who work themselves to exhaustion, season in, season out, stockpiling resources for the harsh winter. A nearby Grasshopper sees their efforts but regards the ants as overcautious and devoid of life so rather than follow the ants’ diligent example, he chooses to wile away the plentiful summer singing and dancing all day long.

But when the winter comes he is starving and in danger of freezing to death. He pleads with the ants to share their food, but, rather surprisingly given Aesop’s often gentle ethos, they tell him to get fucked.

We are ants. We work hard for a living and have little but our continued existence to show for it: that and the knowledge that our efforts have contributed to the sound running of society and the maintained well-being of others. The Grasshopper is an inconsiderate hedonist. He frits his time away larking around and, as we know, time is money and it is not money he can afford to discard. Aesop hits a winner! Out of the park; home run.

When I first came across this tale I was surprised. It lacks the fuzziness or the ambiguity of most of Aesop’s other work. Its metaphor is transparent; its ideals strong and powerful; its stance hard and unwavering.

If Aesop was in the running for PM I’d vote him to power in a shot if all his policies were as ballsy as the moral of this tale!

This hard-lined stance is particularly topical given the upcoming general election. Mr Brown has taken a similar view on those surviving on benefits, claiming he is on the side of the hard-working man and that all the freeloaders will, if he is elected, be kicked off the gravy train.

But is it the right way to be? Can society be so harsh? I think that if these principles are exercised responsibly, then they can result in nothing but a better, more proactive and, most importantly, cohesive society.

Society is singular a system designed to organise the masses, but the fact that it is populated by individuals – societies of one – means that its ideals are often abused and its controls rendered ineffective. By making it harder for people to sponge off the system, society benefits immeasurably.

The only difficulty is found in the implementation of such a system.

It is society’s responsibility to put controls in place, but the individual’s responsibility to be responsible.

So whatever old Gordon does, responsibility will fall to the people to decide if it works or not. Let’s hope, for all our sakes, that it does.

Pick up THE HARE newspaper at Night and Day, Bar Centro, Font or Tiger Lounge in Manchester town centre, or the Oakwood in Glossop.

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