A few weeks ago, it looked like mobs of zombies as hundreds of men stood outside electronic stores – pushing and shoving each other – all to get a chance to purchase the latest video game machine. These scenes illustrate the decline of the American male.

America has focused on elevating the status of women for the last 50 years, and we have to. Congress passed federal laws barring sex discrimination in all its forms in education and on the job.

As a result, women have made huge strides in all areas. Nancy Pelosi’s ascendancy to House speaker is not just coincidental, and Hillary Clinton is a serious candidate for president.

Women have made serious strides in business. However, it is still true that women lag far behind men in heading corporations. But that’s not because women aren’t trying. The glass ceiling exists.

In education, women have made the greatest strides. The majority of college students today are women. They lead also in post-graduate education. Most liberal arts colleges now have to use affirmative action campaigns to attract men.

Before 1972, when Congress passed a federal law banning gender bias, public and private universities openly discriminated against women, requiring them to have much higher entering credentials for admission. Thus, the percentage of women enrolled in college was much less than men.

Today, it’s the opposite: more women than men.

The high school drop-out rate for males is much higher than for females. It’s particularly acute for African-American and Hispanic males.

And without education, men are more likely to commit crimes and end up in prison – and they do, as our male prison population is soaring.

Men are simply falling behind in education.

We are also falling way behind in terms of health. We’re getting fatter. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the percentage of men who are overweight rose to 71 percent between 2003 and 2004. The percentage of those who are obese rose to 31 percent.

We’re dying at higher rates of just about every disease, and we don’t know why, reports Dr. Demetrius Porche, an associate dean at Louisiana State University’s Health Sciences Center School of Nursing in New Orleans and the editor of a new quarterly, American Journal of Men’s Health, that will publish its first issue in March.

As the San Diego Union-Tribune reported recently: “By just about any measure, men’s health is abysmal. American men have an average life expectancy of 75.2 years, and even less – 69.8 years – for black men, compared with 80.4 years for women overall.”

It went on to report that men die of just about every one of the leading causes of death at younger ages than women, from lung cancer to influenza and pneumonia, chronic liver disease, diabetes and AIDS.”

There is a certain irony. In Hillcrest a few weeks ago, we all supported thousands of women marching for breast cancer awareness.

But are men equally as aware of the threat of prostate cancer?

More women die of breast cancer than men do of prostate cancer: 40,970 women will die of breast cancer this year, compared with 27,350 deaths of men from prostate cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.

Let’s be clear. These are both killers and deserve attention. But I suspect if Borat interviewed American males, many wouldn’t even know where their prostate is located.

More than 30 years ago, the California Legislature created the Commission on the Status of Women. It has studied and advised the Legislature on problems confronting women. It has been instrumental in ensuring women access to education, health care, prenatal care and hostile-free job environments. Its mission is to raise the status of women, and it has done that.

It’s time to create a Commission on the Status of Men. No, it’s not about subjugating women’s rights or concerns. It’s about studying why a growing percentage of minority male youth drop out of school, join gangs, father children without support and end up in a cycle of violence leading to prison. It’s about dealing honestly with HIV transmission and meth use among gay men. It’s about educating men that drinking beer, smoking cigars and eating fast food while playing video games is going to cause early death.