A Snake in the Grass will be a Snake in your Bosom.
One winter a Farmer found a Snake stiff and frozen with cold. He had compassion upon it, and taking it up, placed it in his bosom. The Snake was quickly revived by the warmth, and, reverting to its Nature, bit its benefactor, inflicting on him a mortal wound.
"Oh," cried the Farmer with his last breath, "I am rightly served for helping a scoundrel."
There was a time, in the long ago and far away, like around the 1960s and earlier, when the worst insult you could say of someone was, "Hummmpf, he thinks the world owes him a living!"
These people take anything they can get as their due. And then they slither off with no thought of the cost to others., let alone a "thank you" for a favor done for them.
How to chase out those Snakes... Could it be time to whistle up St. Patrick?
It is said that we often come to like those for whom we have done a good turn. But it is equally true that many folks grow to resent, even hate, those to whom they are indebted.
Photography by
Tudor Hulubei
tudor@hulubei.net
The Fable as told by Aesop:
Things have changed. By the end of the 1900s, expecting the world to provide for us appeared to have become a credo to live by. There are folks who, in all seriousness, maintain that the world, indeed, DOES owe them a living! Heck! They didn't ask to be born, right?
