Dead Horse Theory
If you don’t understand this theory, you haven’t lived long enough.
The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”
However, in government, education, and in corporate America, more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase dead horse’s performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
11. Declaring 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. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
And of course….
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
Another Dakota Indian saying is that sometimes you need to hit a jackass in the face with a baseball bat just to get its attention. If the abuse problem has not been enough to get the attention of Rome and the local hierarchy, then I suspect that the hierarchy has not been trying to ride a dead horse but that the leadership of the Church is just a whole herd of dead horses. Is it any wonder that many of the people of God have dismounted?
In the absence of a death certificate, the horse isn’t legally dead, therefore remains eligible for all the rights and benefits of a live horse. A rider should be aware of this before electing to dismount.