Old Maid Games

I recall a card game probably extending back past the 1950s called Old Maid. There was also Authors and a few other choices less popular with me. But Old Maid sticks in mind as blatantly sexist and ageist and, for a country kid in redneck rural Republican Michigan, the most fun of admittedly limited card playing options. Whoever was stuck holding the Old Maid at end of game was the biggest loser, for obvious reasons. Who would want to be associated with that old and useless appendage? National politics in the U.S., all about the marketing, purchase, and sale of two-year and four-year terms of public greed responsibility, increasingly reminds me of OldMaid gamesmanship. And, yes, I don't really mean gamepersonship. This game for avoiding loss of responsibility and authority, loss of face rather than gain of grace, embracing mutual Wins of shared commitment to health and cooperatively prosperous safety, This game in which the OldMaid is played by aging fossil-fuel industries played-out too often militarized ballistic violence, sold-out assault against innocence. These OldMaid industrial choices have most ballistically justified plutocratic wars inviting young, and often most marginalized, players to live with losses to OldMaid political stuckness in the name of patriotic duty, Although not matriotic integrity to our own healthy hands for better Win-Win games and political and economic and personal and family therapy strategies, less violently impinged by nationalistic traumas, fear of losses holding OldMaid over-industriously stuck cards. No one wants to be in unlovely public office when the last drop of oil and last glistening gasp of gas wears through now useless OldMaid pumps and pistons, unhappy triggers and transdegenerational switches, unlubricated OldMaid economic bitches. No one wants to be in office holding the last OldMaid dry-humped card from a 1950s stacked deck when 2020 revisions change climate changing hands into feminist story books of how our generation deliberately and stubbornly chose, like stiff-necked self-chosen people of OldMaids and PatriarchalMen, counter-intuitively choosing the climate pathology card, fascinated by our own death and the death of our habitat and the dearth of any future of humane proportion and design, rhythm and pattern. When we have so many post-millennial cooperative Win-Win options to actively hope and act and restoratively plan and therapeutically draw climate health for both ego and eco justice and global peace for all, including sacred Elder Matriotic Maids. If only Old Feminist Maids and Matriotic Men had written all required history and civic lesson school books and ecopolitical philosophy texts and medicinal prescriptions and legislated cooperative multicultural ethics lesson plans to practice practice practice cooperation, I wonder if having the Elder Matriot card would have been how to win our Win-Win game, and to do so would require letting go of all Old FakePatriot cards of plutocratic, and often patriarchal, Lose-Lose economic-ecological exploitations, Also post "ClimateChange" reknown and renamed as habitually competitive ClimatePathologies longing to restore ClimateHealth for all creatures, most certainly including Old Maids and Masters.