It’s always hard to rejoice along with people who make in a year what many earn in a lifetime, or even over generations.

No matter what financiers do to earn the millions and tens of millions paid out to them in one lump sum, it’s painful, even gut-wrenching to hear about their bonuses.

It’s hard to rejoice along with people who make in a year what many families earn in a lifetime, or even over generations.

The disparities are so great between the poor, the middle class and the rich that a single check from UBS/Warburg is a dream of dynastic wealth for many working people who live in Riverdale, Kingsbridge and Marble Hill.

Is this nearly unbridgeable gap in defiance of the American Dream?

Prior incarnations of the dream declared that anyone who works hard enough can control the kind of life they live and control their own circumstances.

Of course, not everyone works hard. Not everyone has the same level of education or smarts. Not everyone is equally gifted physically.

But if everyone is equal under the law and a good education is available to every child in America, regardless of the ability to pay, then, the story goes, everyone’s spin of life’s wheel has an equal chance of success.

It’s a beautiful ideal and may be the fairest that a fallen mankind can offer itself, but it’s only an ideal. The flaws in the reality are easy to see within our own community.

Children born in Riverdale, Kingsbridge, Van Cortlandt Village, the Amalgamated Houses or Marble Hill attend very different schools. Children who attend PS 24 score higher on tests, and therefore get opportunities to take more tests that then allow them to get into other high-achieving schools, and so on. Those who attend PS 95 aren’t quite so fortunate.

PS 7 is less highly rated than PS 81, John F. Kennedy High School is rated lower than The David A. Stein Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy, MS/HS 141. And none of the public schools offer the likelihood of getting into Ivy League colleges that private schools Fieldston, Riverdale Country School or Horace Mann do.

Without getting any further along in life than elementar y school, probabilities narrow.

As somebody once said, it’s as if every child is given lottery tickets at birth. The difference between each child is the number of tickets they get.

There are some tickets given for physical abilities and even appearance, some more for mental acuity. Some are doled out according to economic background, and even more are determined by a parent’s focus on education. The more tickets you have, the more chances you have to win, even if, as with all lotteries, having even 1,000 tickets is no guarantee.

The hard work is to ensure each child is given an equal number of tickets by society, if not by random chance. One of them may just turn out to be the Goldman one.