Gone with the Wind

 Oftentimes when we think of white people in the south during the civil war era, we imagine a life inebriated with sunshine and rainbows. This, however, is not the harsh reality that citizens of the south were forced to live through. We oftentimes see those in the south during this period of time as demagogues and untouchables. After watching Gone with the Wind I was enlightened to what was previously unbeknownst to me, and that was the fact that, no matter what these people who I previously saw in one lens, can be seen completely different if given the opportunity to peak through another lens. 

Observing this film offered up that new perspective. I was previously one of those people whose one-sided way of thinking clouded my ability to distinguish between the actual truth and my previous fallacies that I thought to be the truth regarding the south. The main catalyst in this change of thought was a character by the name of Scarlett O’Hara. Throughout the course of the movie viewers such as myself were privy to an otherwise unseen way of life in the south for white people. I learned that even though wealthy whites in the south may have had a previously “easy” life before the civil war, this was not the case during and after the war. The devastation that hit the south in this movie was something that I had never even heard of before. These were not just people going through tough circumstances, this was instead peoples’ entire way of life being altered or otherwise destroyed. People were displaced, disenfranchised, and otherwise discontinued on numerous levels.