Happy Thanksgiving

Being a holiday week for the markets, we thought we’d take the opportunity to send out our weekly email a little earlier than usual.  We hope that your Thanksgiving is joyous and filled with family and friends.  Our traditions may vary from family to family, but the meaning of the holiday is immutable: being thankful.

Rockwell’s classic painting of grandma lugging in the gigantic turkey on a platter as the patriarch awaits his carving duties and the surrounding adults and kids wait in anticipation will always be the quintessential image of Thanksgiving for me. He painted this image in 1943 and is titled “Freedom from Want”. It’s part of a series based on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address in which FDR outlined what he saw as four essential freedoms that all people in the world should enjoy.

The following is just a small part of that speech. “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want, which means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants. The four is freedom from fear, which means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor. This is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.”

In the spirit of Norman Rockwell’s famous image, we wish all of you a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.

P.S. I was going to wish you a Happy Turkey Day, but I didn't want to use any fowl language.

* Reposted from November 21, 2012

Bruce J. Mason, MBA