The teacher gave her fifth-grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it. The next day, the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.
Ashley said, “My father’s a farmer, and we have a lot of egg-laying hens. One time we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the car when we hit a big bump in the road, and all the eggs went flying and broke and made a mess.”
“What’s the moral of the story?” asked the teacher.
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!”
“Very good,” said the teacher.
Next, little Sarah raised her hand and said, “Our family are farmers too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. We had a dozen eggs one time, but when they hatched we only got ten live chicks, and the moral of this story is, ‘don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.'”
“That was a fine story, Sarah. Michael, do you have a story to share?”
“Yes, my daddy told me this story about my Uncle Mike. Uncle Mike was a flight engineer in the Gulf War, and his plane got hit. He had to bail out over enemy territory, and all he had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun, and a machete. He drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn’t break, and then he landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops. He killed seventy of them with the machine gun until he ran out of bullets. Then he killed twenty more with the machete until the blade broke. And then he killed the last ten with his bare hands.”
“Good heavens,” said the horrified teacher, “what kind of moral did your daddy tell you from that horrible story?”
“Stay the hell away from Uncle Mike when he’s been drinking.”