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It's a Wonderful Life

The heroic sacrifice of a few can enable good people to prosper.

This classic is about not discounting the significant long-term ramifications of seemingly insignificant actions.

It is also a story about a group of people that, without most of them realizing how important it would be, sacrificed their lives and fortunes for something that had a profound, beneficial, and largely imperceptible effect on the people around them and on the town as a whole.

Summary

George Bailey's father and uncle ran a building and loan, allowing people to pool their savings to be available for relatively low interest loans to families who wanted to build homes that would enable them to get out of the high-rent slums of the greedy, self-serving Potter.

The father seemed to show that he viewed his work as a heroic work of mercy. But his son, George, was primarily concerned with his dreams and ambitions for the future. He read National Geographic and made detailed plans to travel to many countries.

To keep the building and loan going, George took it over after college to allow his younger brother to attend college, with the idea that the brother would take it over from George so that the latter could begin his adventures.

The attachment to the building and loan at this point and for most of the story seems to be mainly out of respect for their father's life work and the horror of seeing it fail or fall into Potter's hands after all of their efforts to keep it going. Neither George nor his brother seems to consider the business's impact on others.

The brother changes his mind and puts George on the spot to decide if he will go adventuring and abandon the building and loan or give up his life's ambition to remain in a small town working tirelessly to maintain a business that is barely surviving, with little hope that either the business or the town would grow, or that someone would ever relieve him of this burden.

Not finished yet ...