From FiveThirtyEight.com and On the Road: Big Stone Gap, Virginia, written by Sean Quinn. The link will take you to the comments page, but the story is just above.
I seldom laugh out loud, but this exchange encouraged a good laugh-out-loud moment.
Last week, Julie Hensley made one of her thousands of phone calls on behalf of Barack Obama. A woman answered. As Hensley ran through her short script, the husband impatiently broke in.
Ma'am, we're voting for the n***er." And hung up
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Hensley wasn't having it. "I went and made a couple other calls but chafed over this absurdity," she told us, "so I called them back, as I still had a couple questions for the wife." This time the man answered, asked pointedly who she was, and when she replied he hung up again.
That wasn't the part that made me laugh, though. I've been through enough relationships to know how things work, so this was the part that funny;
As for Hensley, her story ended with a twist. A couple hours later during a pause in her dials, her phone rang. She recognized the number. "This is going to be good," she remembers thinking, getting ready to scrap.
It was the husband. He was calling for the woman on whom he'd hung up. She then got something she didn't expect -- an apology. Calmly, Hensley told the man she'd accept his apology on one condition -- he had to tell her who he was voting for.
"Oh, I don't normally talk about it but I feel like I owe you," the man said. "I am voting for Senator Obama." He asked if Hensley would like to speak to his wife, as he'd interrupted the original call. Hensley mentioned that she had been surprised when he'd called to apologize. Apparently the husband and wife had been talking the entire couple hours since the original call. "Did she get upset with you?" Hensley asked.
"What do you think?" the man replied.
That little scenario brought back so many memories, some fond and some not so fond, that I had to laugh. Poor guy, he'd probably had to too many calls and his wife had probably had too much of his attitude. I don't blame her.
I sincerely hope that we, as the people of the US, will be able to accomplish these rumors of a sincere change in our national outlook on things racial, economic, and environmental. If not, I have little hope for us. Reading things like this little exchange do provide hope, and sometimes a good laugh, though.