By Stephen Kessler

Through no fault of my own I was born into a family living an American dream in the postwar economic boom years of the late 1940s and early ’50s. My father was an up-from-the-streets sportswear salesman in Seattle who moved to Los Angeles with his wife and three kids to launch a line of designer swimwear that hit the sweet spot of the new American lifestyle. I was born around the same time as the company, Rose Marie Reid Swimsuits, and by the time I was 3 we were living in Beverly Hills.

As I was coming of age in the late ’60s I was embarrassed, almost ashamed, to admit where I was from. “Privilege” was not even speakable, it was such a dirty word. There was a “revolution” going on; even the most comfortably upper-middle-class revolutionaries seldom confessed to their upscale upbringing. They wanted to identify with “the struggle” even if their own day-to-day survival was not in question. Rich people were largely reviled: If they’d earned it themselves, they were capitalists; if they’d inherited it, that was even more incriminating.

It took me a while, but eventually I came to understand that it was only by luck of the draw that I was dealt a good hand and that what I made of it was up to me. A boyhood friend of mine who grew up to be a therapist founded a clinic in Beverly Hills that served the messed-up, drug-addicted, psychologically damaged, privileged youth of that community. The problems they had were different from those of the kids of East or South L.A. but they were just as vexing and often led to equally tragic outcomes.

The same therapist friend, who is still practicing, tells me his clients now are mostly older men who have had successful careers but are suffering existential anxieties over the meaning of their lives. Another shrink I know has spoken of the depression of some of her trust-fund patients who don’t know what to do with themselves — as they don’t really have to do much of anything. Surely such problems are less life-threatening than those of people who work three jobs and sleep in their cars because they can’t afford to rent an apartment; but subjectively the psychic pain can be just as acute and maybe more debilitating.

My father’s journey from 12-year-old grade-school-dropout man-of-the-family newspaper boy to ladies’ garment magnate to real estate investor is one of a kind, but also one of many kinds of American success stories. With my share of his fortune for a cushion (two-thirds of which I was disinherited of by my mother for my political opinions), I could have faded out in my 20s smoking dope and doing nothing. Luckily the muses recruited me early on and I’ve been working for them ever since. I still do a lot of nothing, but in the service of the words, which keep coming.

Donald Trump, who is about my age, was also born into wealth, with a cruel, tyrannical and ruthless father who set him up in a real estate empire that he parlayed into what some would consider a successful career of his own — with psychic wounds he is now inflicting on everyone else. He is the kind of person who gives privilege a bad name. Others do no harm, while still others invest their advantages, their intelligence and their ethics in building careers or organizations meant to benefit others. And still others crash and burn, leaving only wreckage.

All the stereotypes and generalizations about any class of people tend to fall apart when it comes to individual stories. Luck swings both up and down, and sideways. Character counts for a lot but is no guarantee of anything. People betray their origins or transcend them or overcome them in all kinds of different ways. Artistic, professional and entrepreneurial accomplishments all depend on creative thinking, on acts of daring and imagination. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but opportunity is its fairy godfather. It’s not so much what hand we’re dealt that counts, but how we live our lives.

Stephen Kessler is a Santa Cruz writer and a regular Herald contributor. To read more of his work visit www.stephenkessler.com