A Holiday Perspective

A Holiday Perspective

May I wish for you and your family a very happy holiday. Where I live the ground and trees have been covered with white snow, slowing down traffic and making us all a little frustrated or in the holiday mood – depending on your perspective. In honor of the holiday season, I want to talk a little about perspective. All of us with investments have lost a great deal of money in the past several months. For some who are retired, that may be what they are living on. For others of us, those investments were what we hoped to retire on.

But remember those who don’t have investments; those who didn’t lose anything because they had nothing to lose. Those are the people, young and old, who will be worse off in this economy because they will lose their job or because the government program they relied on is now cutting benefits. They were never fortunate enough to have something to fall back on.

Those of us who lost much of our savings are feeling much poorer and are probably a little afraid of what will happen next. But this is the time of year to look at the glass and ask if it is half empty or half full. For those of us with half full glasses, now is the time to look to the charities that we support, and continue to support them. Although we feel poorer, we must ask ourselves whether we really are poor, for there is a big difference between feeling poor and being poor.

In this holiday season, let us remember those who are really poor.

Ellen A. Bruce
President, OWL Board of Directors