Ce n'est pas amusement à être sur le pavé

People walk past as a homeless person takes cover from the cold on a Paris sidewalk November 28, 2005, as six homeless have died in France since the arrival of winter temperatures. French authorities have raised their weather alert in 31 departments and asked for increased vigilance to the homeless in Paris.

What? France has homeless? I was taught in school that homelessness was a byproduct of cruel Republican policies like not giving everyone health care for free. France has everything a socialist political agitator could ask for, yet cars burn in the streets and homeless die as soon as it gets cold. Maybe the French Republic is not dead after all...

Actually, it's not that the homeless get a bum deal under the GOP, but that only when the GOP is around to get the blame are the homeless deemed important. France's homeless problem is small potatoes compared to that of that great American bastion of Republicanism, San Francisco:

Homeless people in San Francisco are dying at a rate of nearly one every other day, according to figures released by the city's medical examiner.

The report counted 169 homeless deaths during the fiscal year that ended July 2003, matching the record annual high since the city first started compiling the data in 1987.

Though the report provided no causes of death, past studies by the Department of Public Health have attributed more than 60 percent to drug and alcohol abuse.

The last sentence, I suspect, says it all. People are not homeless because of a lack of money or work to do; they are homeless because of choices they have made that lead one to having no money and no home. Of course, it's cruel to say so, but that doesn't make it untrue.

Copyright 2005 El Borak, inc. Makers of Spacoon and Sparmadillo brand canned luncheon meats. If you have to ask what's in them, you can't afford anything else.