Gullible Gulls

I clipped the following article from the Reader’s Digest some time ago. It reads:

“In our friendly neighbor city of St. Augustine great flocks of sea gulls are starving amid plenty. Fishing is still good, but the gulls don’t know how to fish. For generations they have depended on the shrimp fleet to toss them scraps from the nets. Now the fleet has moved. …

“The shrimpers had created a Welfare State for the … sea gulls. The big birds never bothered to learn how to fish for themselves and they never taught their children to fish. Instead they led their little ones to the shrimp nets.

“Now the sea gulls, the fine free birds that almost symbolize liberty itself, are starving to death because they gave in to the ‘something for nothing’ lure! They sacrificed their independence for a handout.

“Let’s not be gullible gulls. We … must preserve our talents of self-sufficiency, our genius for creating things for ourselves, our sense of thrift and our true love of independence.”

--Marion G Romney, "The Celestial Nature of Self-Reliance", Ensign, March 2009, 61-65

(For the full article, click on the title)

What a marvelous analogy! I hope we can all learn not to be gullible gulls but cultivate our creative talents like the counsel above, which also brings to mind the counsel by President Uchtdorf, which is beautifully captured in the video below. It's one of my personal favorites.