When I teach, I strive to give my students guidance and support as they become independent thinkers and writers.

I am not always successful.

Objective research, evaluating the credibility of sources, and teasing out the truth from propaganda and prejudice—this process is not automatic, but the result of trial and error and direction from family, teachers, and experience. Most people will stick to their bias—to what they believe as if it were truth—regardless of evidence to the contrary, and throughout their lives. Unfortunately, it is the rare individual who reconsiders what they think they know to be true. We look for support of what we already believe, and fail to seek out reality in the face of our own prejudices.

More than two centuries ago, the United States abandoned the notion of inherited privilege, of God choosing who gets to be queen and who gets to slave. Except we did not give it up. We love our princess narratives, our anointed few.

A friend of Trump’s sold stock in a company that was hit hard by the president’s recent announcement that he would implement a 25% tariff on imported steel and 10% on imported aluminum. That would be fine—buying and selling stock is one way to make money without laboring for it—except that the billionaire friend of the president sold a few days before the announcement. Maybe he was tipped off? And that would be breaking the law.

Like his much-promoted tax cuts, the advantage falls to a narrow slice of America:

“The mills and smelters that supply the raw material, and that would directly benefit from the tariffs, have been shrinking for years. Today, those industries employ fewer than 200,000 people. The companies that buy steel and aluminum, to make everything from trucks to chicken coops, employ more than 6.5 million workers, according to [the highly conservative] Heritage Foundation analysis of Commerce Department data.”

Apparently, many more people, more workers, will be hurt by the tariff than helped, and there is no indication that this disproportion has been taken into consideration when the tariff was announced. Workers and stock-owners sometimes have wildly different priorities. It should be easy to see why, especially for those of us who have lived through decades of corporate raiders.

It’s tempting to wonder if, after Trump changes his mind again, some friend of Trump who bought after the promised tariff drove some stock down will sell high after it comes back up. Buy low, sell high. That is the strategy of gambling on the stock market. However, that would rely on Trump actually having a long game, which few believe he has. The man does things without much planning other than benefit to himself.

Some Americans still cling to the fantasy that human problems are mostly self-created, at least when they judge other people. Captured and tortured as a prisoner of war? They prefer the soldier who was not captured. Struggling to pay bills on minimum wage? Workers willing to work hard do better. Your son died in the war? If you’d paid for a doctor to diagnose bone spurs, he would have lived.

Tell Job he must have done something really, really awful for God to visit such suffering upon his head.

Ironically, it is a distinctively American view, a Puritan, social-Darwinist, Power-of-Positive-Thinking fantasy that we are entitled to take whatever we can grab and that people get what they deserve in life. If your life is hard, this prejudice goes, it’s not only your tough luck, it’s no better than you deserve. If you are a billionaire, it’s not the result of luck or dishonest and brutal business tactics, but superior intelligence and better favor in God’s sight.  . . .  Really?

Many years ago, I showed A Raisin in the Sun to a class of smart 16-year olds. Lorraine Hansberry’s prize-winning play-turned-film concerns a few days in the life of a poor black family living in Chicago. Clearly struggling members of the hard-working poor, that family has ambitions: to live in a house rather than a tenement, to support his family so that his mother need not work, to have a second child, to become a doctor. Late in the film, Walter Lee Younger’s plan to open a business is destroyed when a business partner absconds with his money, money he has been entrusted with by his family. A new home, education, a better future—all their collective opportunity seems to rest in that fund. The women of his family turn on Walter Lee as he falls to his knees in despair. Four boys at the back of my classroom laughed.

I stopped the film.

The boys told me Walter Lee was stupid. He’d made a ridiculous mistake, a mistake they would never make. I took them out into the hall.

Though I did not know these boys all that well, I knew enough to recognize that three of the boys were the sons of thriving local business owners who had worked hard for their success. Their sons assumed that this meant that they, personally, had earned success as well. They assumed because their parents had accomplished so much that their lives would be free of stupid mistakes, that they were smarter and deserved more than Walter Lee. It is the definition of entitlement.

They were given an assignment to write me a brief essay defining “compassion and empathy.” And in the years following, I talked to my classes about making mistakes. If we expect to get through life without doing things we regret, without making stupid mistakes, with damage, we are delusions or doomed to disappointment.

The “best man” does not always win. The best person . . .

Have we not all experienced losing to someone who does not deserve to win? the person who did not study and does not know the material as well as we do but scores better on the test? the person who cuts us off in traffic? who snatches the bargain out from under our reaching hand? Have we always received what we deserved? Haven’t we eve, sometimes, done better that we deserved?

Success comes as the result of hard work and as a result of the luck of birth. It comes to people with enormous vision and creativity. It comes to people who are morally corrupt and willing to do anything to get ahead.

Riches come to those who deserve them, and as often they come to those who do not.