Denial
Daughters meant dowry and debt. Most parents prayed for sons.
Scientific advancements arrived. Doctors could see in the womb, determine the gender of the baby and abort female fetuses. The villagers were jubilant.
With an overpopulation of young men, the village became unsafe for the few remaining girls. Many daughters-only families left for the city. There the daughters discovered they could study more.
When the village boys came of age, there weren’t enough women to marry. They contacted the city families. Those girls refused. The boys — now men — weren’t sufficiently educated.
The village elders decided educating girls must be prohibited.
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12.27.23
You've beautifully captured the horrifying essence of not just how we often arrive at the wrong conclusions through a series of seemingly logical decisions, but more importantly how our simplistic reasoning causes widespread suffering that could so easily have been avoided. I would argue that this very aspect of human reasoning is at the core of what most ails us in this modern world.
Dang. Perfectly stated in literary form. Societal craziness in 100 words. Well done.