People will continue to fight wars over land.
People will fight to their death to obtain or retain land they live on.
Over the past forty five years I have witnessed first hand on my visits to Israel and Ireland how the people have sacrificed their lives to retain the land of their ancestors.
It’s clear to me there is a deeply rooted psychological need that is met in no other way. One’s identity as a human being is tied to a sense of being tied to the property you stand on.
As the Oklahoma tenant farmer says to the tractor driver sent by the bank to plow over his land, “the land is me . . . .” (John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath)
In my own life, I have experienced this unique psychological tie we have to owning our homes. In 1992, we were asked by the Mormon church to go to South America as missionaries for three years.
I remember the day I stepped away from the home we sold in California. I had this sense of losing my selfhood. However, that continued for only about a week. Then it left me. I gave myself a congratulatory pat on the back for overcoming my tie to property. I felt I was greater than this weird loyalty that possesses us over property.
After three years we returned, not to my homeland of California where I was born and raised, but to Utah where I thought we had no particular draw.
Within a year of returning, my wife had purchased a plot of undeveloped land in the upper avenues of Salt Lake City. She paid full price for it. No ten or twenty percent down. She went full out. Then she hunkered down, and with the help of a designer and contractor, she built a home that could last well into the next two centuries.
After that, she started landscaping one plant at a time until fourteen hundred plants
and bushes and trees had been placed in the ground. Now she is slowly gutting the interior of the home, which she designed in the first place, and is refashioning it for no other reason than that she can and that she wants to. She is the land, she is the life in the property, she is the property.
It’s now twenty five years after I left that home we sold in California. In addition to the home she built for us, she worked with our son-in-law to build four more homes, three of which are occupied by three of our children.
Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would never had dreamt it could have happened to me. Here I am in the land of my great grandparents, my grandparents, my mother, the birthplace of our firstborn, in a home that was built by my wife, with three additional homes built by my wife that three of our children live in and own.
Without consciously acknowledging it, I end up possessing and settling in the land of my ancestors with two more generations behind me. We have become our land. Every piece of soil, every stone, every length of lumber, every mix of cement, every plant, every bush, every tree, every sink . . .that leaks, every weed that grows, every stain on a rug that must now be replaced.
What strange thing beats within us that attaches us to our land even when we feel we are above such primitive instincts?
So I ask myself this question: if invaded in any form or fashion, would I defend my land to the death for the mere reason that I possess it? If you have read this far, what do you think my answer will be?