What To Do About a Dead Horse

I can’t take an ounce of credit for today’s Southern Chuckle. It was passed on to me by a member of the All Things Southern community who got it from someone else, who got it from someone else, who took it from someone else. They all wish to remain anonymous, but this is how I heard it. Among the accumulated wisdom of the ancient peoples of the world were certain principles that were routinely passed on from generation to generation. Sadly, much of this wealth has been lost over time. In ages past, people understood and repeated certain axioms. For instance, when you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount immediately and find a healthy live horse to ride.

Today, however, our leaders are applying vastly different strategies. What follows is a summation of the steps they often take to deal with a dead horse. I shall let you, the listener, decide on their effectiveness. Today, when faced with a dead horse, our leaders might:

1. Buy a stronger whip.

2. Change riders.

3. Appoint a committee to study the horse.

4. Arrange to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.

5. Lower the standards so that dead horses can be included.

6. Reclassify the dead horse as living-impaired.

7. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.

8. Harness several dead horses together to increase speed.

9. Provide additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance.

10. Do a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.

11. Declare that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than do some other horses.

12. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for all horses. And, of course… the most widely used strategy of them all:

When faced with a dead horse, our leaders often promote it to a higher position.

 

Hugs, Shellie