How good are you at keeping a secret? Maybe pretty good, you are saying. Well, how well do you keep your own secrets?

Huh? What are we talking about?

Well--it's just that our culture today wants to trash everything. All of our most personal thoughts, treasured intimacies, even our bodies--are now supposed to be under a microscope for anyone to examine, dismiss, or trivialize.

No wonder so many people are cynical or depressed. We've lost the old-fashioned but valuable idea of modesty.

It's hard to feel modesty when you are housed in a co-ed dorm with open halls and gang showers, where you have to shave in front of girls you've never seen before. Or when you're on the team bus where everyone changes clothes--girls and guys--like it's no big deal. Maybe to you, it's still a big deal--but you're ashamed to feel this way.

Or you get the latest Abercrombie & Fitch catalog and are grossed out at the way their over-priced, poorly-made clothes are un-worn, by models who look like they're drugged--or they'd never let these photos be taken. We hope. Or you see MTV's coverage of spring break in Cancun, with all the nudity, groping, and casual sex, and you wonder: is this the best I can hope for? Yuck!!

It's time to feel grossed out. We're losing something precious. the idea that there's something special about revealing ourselves to others, and it shouldn't be done casually, either physically or emotionally. We don't need to let everything hang out there to be used and abused as others see fit.

This was what we used to call "good taste."

It's nice to hold our dreams close. That way, just like babies, they will have a chance to grow and mature before they meet the cold, cruel world.

And so their prospects of survival will be so much brighter. And there's nothing quite so wonderful as a dream that comes true.

A good book on this subject is:

A Return to Modesty: Recovering the Lost Virtue by Wendy Shalit. The Free Press (division of Simon & Schuster), New York, 1999.