We hate change and yet have none for the homeless. We fight to keep prayer out of schools while allowing pornographers the right of free access to innocent children on the world-wide-web. Parents cannot lay hands on their children but complete strangers are allowed to assault their souls. Courts protect the rights of virtual child pornographers while children are told the pledge of allegiance is unconstitutional. We fight to clean up the air on our planet, but surrender to the pollution of sadistic and degrading lyrics in our music. These are the times of fattening foods and diet drinks, baggy clothes and tight fists. We have raised our incomes, but lowered our standards. Our bodies grow taller while our character is stunted. In these times of terror we keep our biases and prejudices safe. These are the days where it takes two incomes to pay for one divorce, where we live glued to the television as our families fall apart. People have deep debt, and shallow relationships. We start fires in our forests and smother sparks of creativity in our children's hearts.

Now is the time for us to wipe the soot from our glasses. Take a deep polluted breath and then take inventory. We have work to do, hard work. We have been lazy long enough. If terrorists have taught us anything they have taught us that life is not to be taken for granted. Life is not an entitlement, it is an endowment, a precious gift, fragile and beautiful, and each moment counts. We can no longer afford to be spectators. We must be willing to suit up and play full out. We must remind ourselves that we are human-kind, and it is time for us to be both. Otherwise we will find that we have evolved into something else: human-cold, human-cruel, human-lost, human-doomed, human-entitled to fail.

Most of us have been told at one time or another "Happiness is a state of mind." Or possibly we have heard, "Attitude is everything." It is time to take a hard look at our attitudes and perspectives and contemplate how they may be influencing our lives. Perspective plays an important and dramatic role in the choices we make, and the actions that we take in our lives, as does our attitude. Is there a difference between attitude and perspective? I believe there is. Attitude is a state of mind that most often we are aware of choosing, while perspective, more often than not, serves as a pair of colored lenses that we are unaware of. If while growing up you learned to view the world through a pair of yellow lenses, you would not know that what you were seeing was yellow. You would imagine that everyone saw the world the same way, and yellow would look right, familiar, and the way it should be, to you. These articles will ask you to examine if what you believe to be right, is right, or simply looks right to you because of colored lenses. We will examine how different perspectives color people's attitudes. And then, discuss in great detail the painful consequences of an entitled perspective.

A friend of mine recently got a phone call. He and several colleagues fund a scholarship program for a local college. A young woman called his office and the conversation went something like this:

"I am calling to find out where my scholarship is?" the young woman stated.
"What scholarship might you be referring to?" asked my friend.
"The two thousand dollar scholarship that you promised to me a year ago," she continued.
"Can you give me a few more details?" asked my friend.
"Yes, you wrote me a letter and said that I could have a two thousand dollar scholarship a year ago, but when I decided to not come back to school, I didn't get it."
"That would be correct," my friend patiently explained. "The scholarship money is for furthering your education, and if you quit school you would not have received the money for the semester that you did not attend."
"Well, I have decided to attend this fall and I want my scholarship," insisted the young woman.
"Your scholarship money went to someone else who attended school last year, so you have no scholarship money owed to you," he explained patiently.
"That's not fair. It was mine," argued the young woman. "How could you give my scholarship money to someone else?"

My friend spent the next thirty minutes of his valuable time explaining to the young woman the difference between an entitlement and an endowment and told her that if she could include a written essay on the distinction between them, and prove that she fully understood that any scholarship money that she might receive was indeed a great endowment, only then, would his board consider her for next year.

A great deal of the success we experience in our relationships comes from the attitude we bring to them. If our attitude is one of entitlement, our relationships will continually fail and disappoint us. But if our attitude is one of endowment, our relationships will be filled with appreciation, hope, cooperation, and generosity. Our endowments are nurtured by appreciation.

Entitlement cripples our ability to be grateful. Just as dark is the absence of light; entitlement is the absence of appreciation. Entitlement, and the fear that accompanies it, limits us from seeing anything but scarcity, lack, frustration and disappointment. It chokes the life out of hope. It shrinks our thoughts of social concern and responsibility into petty, self-serving complaints.

Who or what should you be grateful for?
It doesn't matter. Take your choice.
You can be grateful to the power company for the electricity,
or Edison for inventing the light bulb,
or the designer of the lamp,
or the money to pay for the power,
or God for the energy behind it all,
or any combination thereof.
And that's just a lamp.
Peter McWilliams and John Roger
You Can't Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought

Everyone tells us that one of the keys to success is developing a great attitude toward life. There is only one way to develop a great attitude toward life and that is to cultivate a reverence for it. Reverence, as defined in Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, means "a feeling or attitude of deep respect, love, awe, and esteem for something sacred." As you can see from this definition, reverence is the antithesis of entitlement. In Albert Schweitzer's autobiography, the Nobel Peace Prize winner wrote that having a reverence for life means that we understand life is sacred, and our duty is to cherish it. In other words, life and all it brings to us, is a great gift. Schweitzer believed that many of us too many of us go through life without thinking about its meaning and especially its value. We must cultivate and nurture a reverence for the rights we receive as employee, students, family members, and citizens, only then can we understand what a great privilege they are.