The stores at the malls feature the latest line of fashion jeans. Girls twelve to fifteen can hardly wait for
their arrival. Those designer jeans are a must have. The sports shop has received the newest line of sneakers endorsed by three of the biggest names in the NBA. Anybody who is anybody is wearing them. So what if those pants cost ninety bucks or the sneakers a hundred and twenty, they are necessary for survival at school. Only a person of no class would be caught dead in anything else. The facts most parents can not possibly afford them matters little. Image is everything.
Have we as a culture become puppets for
fashion designers? Are our lives so trivial ad men control the manner of our dress and choice of cars? Young people having no concept of how much it takes out of bill money don''''t figure in this. They are so consumed with what others have on for clothes they must fit in. Is it that
Important?
Maybe it is fine to look nice, but must it only be acceptable in certain lines of apparrel? With the ideas our youth already have of success and failure must we feed fuel to the flames by advocating poorer earning persons are beneath us? Just because a person wears slacks not having designs on them, are they lessor of a person? Because a teenage boy isn''''t wearing pump sneakers does he deserve to be humiliated or teased. Is it that Important?
What is important is what you think of yourself and how you see yourself. Self respect does not come from wearing the right clothes or hanging with the right people. What is important is how one feels about others as equals.
Anyone can don the mask of vanity and false pride. Once the mask comes off, the real person appears. That is what is important,
And what is certainly most important is teaching the above sentence.