DailySusan Humor Blog

CALLING IN (NOT SICK BUT) SHOT

My late Uncle Dave was a liberal Democrat in a family of conservative Republicans. I admired how he lived out his politics. For example, he ran a brass and aluminum foundry on Omaha’s Near North Side, where the workforce was mostly poor, black and undereducated.

During the 1960s, as civil rights battles erupted around the country and even in sleepy old Omaha, other businesses fled the city’s central core. Crime and unrest became very difficult for business people. But Uncle Dave stubbornly kept his foundry open. He knew how important a regular paycheck was to a family’s stability.

He even innovated: he had the wives come in on Fridays to pick up those paychecks, since the men had a tendency to squander their earnings each weekend at the racetrack and in the bars and so forth.

Well, things got pretty intense down there, and he did eventually close the business. Just before he did, though, a wife called in to say that her husband wouldn’t be in that day.

Why not?

“Because I shot him last night.”

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Prayer request: Father, my teacher friend Tracy was telling me about a high-school senior in west-central Omaha who can’t read or write, yet has been given “social promotions” from grade to grade all these years. He isn’t really learning-disabled, just illiterate. His future is so uncertain, and his self-esteem is so low. We pray that You will inspire people at his new school to find strategies and methods to help him bridge the gap toward literacy and find a constructive career path. And we pray that all those educators who looked the other way over the years would realize the harm they’ve done to this precious young man, and would never allow this to happen again. (1 Corinthians 3:5-9)