Editor’s note: check the other posts on this website to read about real life strategies and events that make the following laughs seem more like parables.

The tribal wisdom of 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.

In modern education and government, however, a whole range of far more advanced strategies is often employed, such as:

• Buying a stronger whip
• Changing riders
• Threatening the horse with termination
• Appointing a committee to study the horse
• Arranging a visit to other countries to see how others ride a dead horse
• Lowering the standard so that dead horses can be included
• Re-classifying the dead horse as “living impaired”
• Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse
• Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed
• Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance
• Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders improve the dead horse’s performance
• 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
• Re-writing the expected performance requirements for all horses
• Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.