France currently counts 140,000 homeless people — 30,000 of which are children. A 2018 report by the Secours Catholique revealed that in total there are around 8.8 million people living below the poverty line in France in 2017. This means they are living on an income of less than €1,026 a month, and many of them live on considerably less. One in every eight French people live in poverty. Despite all of this, France remains the sixth richest country in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund.
The next time someone tries to pretend like you need to choose between homelessness or immigration, nurses’ pay or a tax cut, a children’s hospital or a motorway, remember this moment. The money is there at a click of a finger. It just isn’t in our hands.
“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing – the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (via quotespile)
