Fashions nowadays stress not only a lack of decency, but of anything finite. Materialism rules. One has to wonder if the current world understands such concepts as beauty and decency, which have been degraded and defrocked of all mystery.

By Robert Duncan

I'm tired. Tired of being bombarded by images, like the young girls in the office or shops that insist on wearing trousers that hit them below their bikini lines. It honestly seems like often there is more skin showing than cloth.

How is a fellow supposed to keep his head clear - not to mention having Holy thoughts while paying at the checkout counter. But perhaps more seriously we should be asking who are these women dressing for. Something tells me that women don't dress as if they should be "working on street corners" for other women, but instead do so for men.

Is this the result of when men debase femininity to a sexual act?

Fashions nowadays stress not only a lack of decency, but of anything finite. Materialism rules. One has to wonder if the current world understands such concepts as beauty and decency, which have been degraded and defrocked of all mystery.

I am reminded of a case a few years ago in Madrid that shocked Spaniards nationwide, and involved a young Spanish woman from a well-off family who was attending university and had a baby.

Nobody knew she was pregnant - supposedly not even her boyfriend.

According to the woman's testimony, she had the baby in the bathtub. Thinking the baby was dead she wrapped it in a plastic bag and then placed it at the bottom of her closet.

Then she went to sleep.

The next morning she went to the university as if nothing had happened.

Police expressed surprise at her lack of emotion when telling what she´d done. They also say there was plastic in the baby's mouth, as if trying to prevent it from crying, and it had abrasions.

The mother says the baby "dropped."

Coupling a lack of decency with a throw-away philosophy is dangerous. Once the line is crossed, taste becomes mistaken for pleasure. It creates moral monsters - like young women who toss babies away as if they are disposable tissues.

At what stage, one has to ask, is the complete lack of compassion and appreciation for all that is human and divine the result of changing one solitary "l" in the word "class" for an "r."

Robert Duncan is a journalist and ombudsman for foreign press in Spain. He is an Executive Board Member and Vice-President for the Organización de Periodismo y Comunicación Ibero-Americana, and Vice-President of the energy and telecommunications association, APSCE.
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