American History- A Fish Tale
Hundreds of years they'd wallowed in this pond, praying, "Oh God of Fishes, please free us to go where our little fishies can thrive, where we can breathe free, where we can swim safely wherever we want."
One day God took the fish on a magical miraculous journey across the sea to a land sparkling with lakes from sea to sea.
The fish loved their new home and thanked their God and said, "We will do whatever it takes to stay here in this land of lakes!"
God answered, "Great! Just share this land with my other creatures, and NEVER bite the hooks of your previous masters- don't eat their fish food - don't take their bait, because it has invisible, unbreakable lines attached, and on the other end of the lines are horrors that will make your new land worse than the old stink pond.
The fish said- "Of course! Anything you say - you're God!"
The fish loved swimming in their new lake-land, free to jump, float, worship and sun themselves and see clearly through the water.
Then one day a big red worm floated in.
The worm said, "Eat me and I'll lend you cheap money to fight your enemies."
The fish said, "That's a bargain! The scaries who live in this land are big monsters! God won't fight them for us!"
So some of the fishes ate the worm.
But the worm had a hook and those fish got yanked away.
The surviving fishes birthed baby fishies, who didn't listen to their parent's warnings, and so more worms came - one worm was called "borrowing money loaned at a profit",
another worm was called "the convenience of paper money",
"free education for your children",
"Social Security",
"the Victory Tax",
"drugs to make you feel happy and forget your troubles."
Before long, the fish lay huddled at the bottom of a pond even stinkier than the old pond across the sea:
All of the benefits their parents had enjoyed: easy money, retirement, euphoria- all these were gone.
The fishes shivered, sick and dumb.
The fishes hated the bottom of this stink pond but they had no idea how to get out.
The mess was so big the fishes couldn't clean it up.
The fish blamed each other.
In desperate rage some of them went nuts and killed each other.
The fish constantly elected new leaders.
But the leaders fled the pond and didn't help.
The leaders went to work for the same Kings and masters who had dirtied the old pond across the sea.
Up above the stink pond, the elite Few men (who had offered the fish the worms) lived in beautiful palaces with trees and gold and precious stones harvested from God's good land.
Every once in a while the masters would pull a fish out of the pond to stock their choice ponds so they could eat the fish's babies.
And the stink-pond fish hoped every day that one of the Masters would throw a crumb of their good food into the pond.
But the Masters just flooded the pond with sewage from their toilet pipes.
The masters laughed, "Stupid, worthless fish. They're not fit to be free. They had freedom and gave it up for a few measly worms. They should feel lucky we let them stay here."
And God said, "I see whacha' mean."