THE PEASANTS WILL NEVER STAND FOR SUCH FOOLISHNESS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 29, 1992                   TAG: 9202290008
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
THE PEASANTS WILL NEVER STAND FOR SUCH FOOLISHNESS
Another fable for our times, based on the Virginia legislature's passing a law that does away with the 25-day interest-free grace period on your credit card:
It was winter, and the princes and princesses who governed in the Golden City hard by the sacred river chose again to smiteth the peasants where they lived.
That is to sayeth, in their credit cards.
"Woe and alas," the peasants said. "The times already be out of joint, and we suffereth privation daily, and yet the princes and princesses in the Golden City doth add new woes to our miserable lives.
"Was it not in olden times a measure of a man's honor and thrift that he paid off his credit card every month and thus escaped the interest charged by the money lenders?"
And they pounded their heads with their fists and raised a pitiable lament.
At the same time, the money lenders who had persuaded the princes and princesses to allow them to sock it to the peasants waxed exceeding happy, and there was much rubbing of hands.
And the princes and princesses returned to their own provinces and as usual heard not the pitiful moans of the peasants. And they puffed themselves up and were overproud.
But while the money lenders rubbed their hands, the peasants' sorrow turned to calm rage, and they conferred and devised their revenge.
And all across the kingdom, angry bonfires burned into the night, and there was a smell of hot plastic in the air.
They burned nightly on the hills of the western part of the land and in the flatlands to the east. Yea, they burned even on the plains before the Golden City.
And yet, the money lenders and the princes and the princesses were not impressed.
"It is nothing," they said. "It is merely the peasants performing some callow folk ritual. Leaveth them to heaven. Lord knows the wretches deserveth what little amusement they can get, however simple and inane."
But when the next Great Season of Gift Giving came, the money lenders noticed the peasants were not slapping down plastic as had been their custom in happier times in the kingdom.
The peasants had discovered cash, and the bonfires in the spring had been made of credit cards, and the money lenders tore their three-piece garments when they saw the gold they had lost in peasant interest payments.
"Alas, it is our end," they said. "The peasants have discovereth ye olde cashe." And they threw ashes in their hair.
The moral is: Those who socketh it to the peasants know not when they may be socketh back.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB