We are witnessing the fruit of fatherlessness, with a stage four prognosis, and it has metastasized throughout the entire culture. This brave new world we are watching unfold will not usher in the utopia that many imagine—it will destroy everything in its wake. It doesn’t have plans to rebuild anything at all. Fatherless men were not taught to build, either in terms of homes or legacies. The feminized culture has emasculated them, both in mind and body, and taught them to do nothing but emote. Feelings don’t build civilizations. Blood, sweat, and sacrifice do.

We are currently living in an age of The Great Epidemic.

Bombarded daily with limp-wristed shouts of selective outrage about things like systemic racism, white privilege, and toxic masculinity, we are told these plagues spread out like a blanket over our society. Inventions of victimhood is all the rage, literally. It is everywhere, hiding under every rock and overshadowing every institution. But there is a destructive force looming beneath it all, a true epidemic that is currently tearing society asunder.

The epidemic of fatherlessness.

Words that Kill

I come from a long line of failed fathers. My paternal heritage is one of abandonment, drunkenness, drugs, and jail. My father engrossed himself in crime and vices, like his father before him. His grandfather raised him in his home, while his own father laid around in a drug-induced stupor for most of his life. That apple didn’t fall from the tree at all; it rotted in place, but one seed was able to fall: Me.

My father and mother were never married and I was born out of wedlock. My birth certificate does not bear his name and he could not be troubled to be there when I came into the world. As a result, I bear my mother’s maiden name.

Their life was troubled. At times my father was abusive—physically at some points, but always mentally. He was a master at the art of guilt manipulation. This continued nearly until the day she died of cancer. I was almost 4. She was 26.

After my mother’s death, a short custody battle ensued between my father and my maternal grandparents. At the time, he was a jobless addict and was spurred on by his grandfather to step up to the plate for his child. The judge gave him an ultimatum: If you want your child, get a job and get sober. It never happened, at least the sobriety part. At that point, my grandparents were awarded temporary guardianship of me. It was never contested again.

Throughout my childhood years I would see him on occasion. He would come to our small church on Sunday evenings, sit in the back pew, and give me a hug and few bucks. That ended when he got arrested for stealing a case of beer from a 7-Eleven. After that I saw him maybe once a year on my birthday, but that eventually faded as well.

The last time I saw my father in the flesh I was 16. Eighteen years ago. I was walking home from a friend’s house, kicking up dust on our dirt road when I heard the screaming. When I looked up I noticed my father’s blue Chevy truck parked in front of my grandparent’s house. I did not catch the exchanges. He was screaming at them; they in return. It was one of those surreal moments in life, a moment that didn’t feel real.

As I made my way up the driveway, he stopped, looked at me and said, “There’s that bastard. Don’t you know you’re just a bastard?”

Those were the last words he ever spoke to me. His voice and those words etched into my mind, forever.

The Path of the Storm

Much of my childhood could be summed up by pain and Ritalin. Uncontrolled emotions carried me into my adolescence and young adult years. Anger, bitterness, sadness, indifference. I felt and lived with them all as they engulfed like a flood. It was the air I breathed. Most times I could keep things in check: a few punched out windows here and there helped dull my embittered heart.

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