Ubi est mea? ("Where's mine?")

-- Unofficial motto of Chicago

Everybody's thinking about bailouts. I'm thinking about Aesop.

In particular, the old Greek's famous fable of the hardworking ant and the lazy grasshopper.

You remember, don't you?

The lowly ant worked hard all summer. He saved up for the winter. And when it came -- as it always does -- he was prepared.

He had set his resources aside. He would survive.

All the while the grasshopper lived a fast and loose life. He enjoyed his summer. He did not prepare.

When winter came, the grasshopper realized the endless summer wasn't. Things were about to change.

But instead of paying for his folly, he did what many seem to be doing now: He asked the ant for a bailout.

In the fable's earliest versions, life was harsh. The ant refused. The grasshopper starved.

Everyone who heard the story got the message: Keep working.

If you think about it, that's a very practical, useful lesson.

But we don't seem to like harsh lessons anymore, and we certainly hate sad endings.

Over the past 100 years, versions of the ant-grasshopper fable have softened.

In most current versions, the ant shares and the grateful grasshopper "learns his lesson."

Everybody wins.

When Hollywood (Walt Disney) first got hold of the fable in the 1930s, it featured a cartoon in which the grasshopper was saved but had to spend the winter with the ants, provided he play his fiddle and entertain them.

Disney's cartoon even introduced the song The World Owes Me a Livin' , from which you can draw your own conclusions.

The story comes up half a century later in a 1988 film Times Change . In this version, I am told, the grasshopper simply eats the ant.

I'm afraid that trend is continuing, and as someone who identifies with the ants of the world, I'm getting a bit uncomfortable.

There are grasshoppers all around us and they are looking desperate.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe all those grasshoppers have finally learned their lessons.

Maybe they'll roll up their sleeves and start planning and saving and working hard like all us ants.

If not, well, consider yourself warned.

Aesop had another famous fable about a boy who cried wolf.

As I recall, that one didn't turn out so well, either.