My mom used to say, “we won the lottery when we were born here.” We live in Canada, in Vancouver, specifically, but she was from just outside of Toronto. What she meant by this phrase was, we are no more deserving of a safe, secure existence than anyone else who is born into this world. We have the unfathomable privilege of going to bed each night without a thought about whether or not our house will still be standing in the morning. We send our children to school believing wholeheartedly that they will be waiting for us when we pick them up. This privilege is so all encompassing that we tend to take it for granted, to take it as a given right, until a world event occurs in some faraway land that thrusts the alternative squarely in our faces. What makes us more deserving of safety and security than a baby born in Syria, or Iran, or Ethiopia, or Ukraine, or Palestine, or Israel? The answer is nothing. We didn’t earn this. We are the lucky ones. The lottery winners. The one in a million.