What If We Reap What We've Sown... Or What Happens When We Decide Children Don't Need Dads?

What if we, with all good intentions, sent our society into a downward spiral the day we decided that women and their children could get along just fine without a husband and/or father in the household? What if we began this to elevate the self images of our girls and women, but in the process demoted our men and boys to the status of irritating, unnecessary evils?

What if women began to treat men like "boy toys" while trying to attain sexual equality? Or better yet, what would happen if women decided to marry other women because men have become unnecessary and irrelevant? What if the women were the only ones to influence their male children's self-identity in their formative years?

What if the messages that our male and female children received were solely nuturing or abandonment messages for an entire generation? What if we exhibited only disdain for bumbling, stupid, absent, men-do-leave dads?

What if the absence of "hunters" in our children's lives left them without the tools necessary for self-protection? What if we outlawed guns--real and toy--and our children became the only adults in the world to be afraid to kill rather than be killed in a war? Would a nation of only "gatherers" be able to survive?

What kind of self-respect would a young man have if he could no longer be the primary bread winner, protect his family, be loved by those he loves for his innate, natural qualities of strength and power? Where would we be headed if we ignored the qualities each member of the family has naturally been given and didn't honor them for those qualities?

What would happen to a man who grew up trained only to defer to the women (after all they were the power figures) in his life?

Would we see men devalued? Would we see selfish "lifetime students" raising, but not really, their children to feel less important than ___________ to the two people who brought them into the world. (You fill in the blank with career, higher education, service to others, an affair with another man or women, nights out with friends, drugs, or whatever.) Would we reap just what we have so self-centeredly sown?

Would we raise a nation of cowards? Would we raise nation afraid but incapable of caring for itself? Would we raise a nation doomed to failure without the necessary balance we owed our children the day we conceived them? Would we?