I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving break. My wife and I spent the holiday in Georgia, visiting her brother, his wife and their school-aged daughter. It was super chilled – plenty of eating, snoozing, fishing and shooting the breeze.

As a young man doing a great job of raising a small family, my brother-in-law is very active in his daughter’s education. He and his wife are those kind of parents always putting their hand up to volunteer, to man the stalls – they are regulars around the halls and playgrounds of the local school.

One day, as we were driving to the fishing hole, he told me about the difficulties some school districts have raising funds for key programs and services, and the great inequalities that exist in schools based solely on the income levels of the people who live around them. Much like in Washington, each school district has a foundation charged with the responsibility of raising contributions from residents. What this means for schools in poorer neighborhoods is obvious – more difficult fundraising challenges and, so, less money for programs.

It is a self-perpetuating cycle. Schools with fewer resources, fewer special classes, fewer teachers, perform worse on comparative testing, making it difficult to attract affluent families with young children to the area. On the other side, wealthy areas are able to raise more money for their schools, get the best resources, and perform better in testing. The cycle is easy to understand. But so are the problems it creates.

Much like the debate over health care, at its core is a picture of how Americans see themselves, who they are and what they have become – their birthrights. Deeply ingrained in the American psyche is the idea of a freedom to succeed, to rise up from the most desperate of beginnings and make of yourself what you will. And that those in poverty are there by their own faults.

It is a concept only true at the broadest and least examined of levels – it stands up as crowd-pleasing ethos, but is a tragically flawed way to describe a real state of affairs and a society in dire need of something more honest.

Education is a good illustration, and as an Anglo-Saxon raised in an age and country where my race dominated society and all power structures, I am as good an example as most anyone. My mother was not wealthy, but she was white and well-educated and so always had good jobs in an Australia still defined by racism against pretty much anyone who wasn’t of British stock. She was white and well-educated only because her parents were white and well-educated, and as an upstanding navy family could afford to send her to good schools. They, and the generations before them, benefited from a machine built to support and assist their kind, but not all kinds. Other races were vilified and persecuted, denied access to education, social services, business and land ownership. These are basic amenities that most of the population take for granted, me included.

And so while I worked hard in school and have had my share of tough times as an adult, I know that I started the game many rungs above other Australians, purely by chance.

The same is true here. The idea that we all started from the same America and earned what we earned is not only wrong – it is destructive. It has convinced many that what they have is somehow all because of their own genius and toil. I will admit, there are many exceptions to the rule, but in the enormous picture they are still exceptions.

It is the reason why so many believe they have no responsibility toward people in poor areas, and to those who happen to have been born on the other side of arbitrary lines on the earth. It is the reason why poor schools are underfunded, low-income families and immigrants are without health insurance.

These are people born into disadvantages that many people in Issaquah and Sammamish can’t imagine – among them the right to a good education and the ability to afford it. Not to mention the right not to be persecuted, murdered by governments, displaced, brutalized, banned, imprisoned. Many of our neighbors in this city and others nearby started their lives this way. Still, many of us refuse to acknowledge that so much of our existence is pure luck. Fluke. Not a right but a miraculous windfall.

Catching the bus back from Sea-Tac airport on Sunday night, on our way home from Georgia, my wife and I watched a homeless black man get off at a downtown stop. He was missing the lower part of one leg. He struggled with his cart of belongings before trudging off into the freezing night.

“Some people have it rough, don’t they?” my wife said, sadly. Yeah, they really do.

It was on that bus ride home that I had my real Thanksgiving. When you realize that nothing separates you from them but pure chance, it makes these social disparities seem all the more insane, and the idea of spreading our resources a little more equitably a logical extension of being human.