Written over 70 years ago by Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind speaks to us today as strongly as it did when it won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize and swept the Academy Awards two years later. The story of a spirited Southern woman, Scarlett O’Hara, who lived through the Civil War in Georgia, is one of the best-selling books of all time. While its main fame is that of a great romantic drama, Gone with the Wind also emphasizes the importance of land and home to a struggling people.
It can be easy, especially when the times are rough and less people are buying and selling successfully, to forget the importance of real estate in the face of economic hardship. Currently, we are fighting our own war against a recession, against lost jobs, bankruptcy and the threatening cycle of poverty. While it may not be in everybody’s best interests to invest in real estate at this time, having property of your own is one of the best long-term goals for both you and the country.
There is a passage in the book Gone with the Wind where Gerald O’Hara tells his daughter, “Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything… ‘Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for–worth dying for.” Even today, when the Internet and modern communication have brought people together from all over the world, the identification with land is strong in us. We identify ourselves as members of our country, of our community and even our neighborhood.
The successful selling of books, like the successful selling of homes, involves a promise to the buyer; a promise fulfilled with the successful conclusion of a story and happy memories of the journey. The purchase of property is more than having something to call your own; it is also the promise of permanence, of something you can return to for strength to withstand the ill fortune that turns prosperity into poverty and security into uncertainty.
While real estate may seem as the demon that brought the economy to the state it is in now, it was not real estate that failed. Like Scarlett’s image of Ashley Wilkes, the “dream home” dangled before buyers’ eyes crumpled when examined critically. And, like Scarlett when she realized that she had never understood the two men she had loved, buyers all over the country were in shock when they realized that the terms that allowed them to buy a home outside of their means were also the terms that ruined their chance for any home at all.
Right now, the country is trying desperately to regain its lost footing and that, I believe, is by “going back to Tara”: investing in the land we live on. If every person who knows of Gone with the Wind were to invest in a modest piece of real estate within their power to maintain, money would again flow into the economy and our communities, like the haggard Tara after the War, could be rebuilt into something greater than before.
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