IN 2017, more than a half-million human beings — 553,742 of them to be exact — were homeless in the U.S. for at least some time. Last year was the first since the 2008 financial crisis that America’s homeless population grew. The 2016 U.S. census found that 12.7 percent of Americans — which translates to just over 43 million human beings — live below the poverty line. Millions of American children live in hunger: according to a 2015 U.S. Department of Agriculture study, the U.S. has “13.1 million households with children that often go without food: ‘food-insecure households.’”
Those horrifying statistics are just for the U.S. Extreme human deprivation and suffering is pervasive all over the planet: hundreds of millions of human beings live in unimaginable poverty. According to the 2016 comprehensive World Bank study on global inequality, “767 million people are estimated to have been living below the international poverty line of US$1.90 per person per day. Almost 11 people in every 100 in the world, or 10.7 percent of the global population, were poor by this standard.” There is an “estimated 780 million illiterate adults worldwide, nearly two-thirds are women.”
IN THE MIDST of all of this need, struggle, misery and deprivation, a just-created online charity fund is enjoying massive success and an extraordinary outpouring of donations from small donors. It has become one of the most successful pages on the popular GoFundMe site: a campaign to raise money for former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe (pictured, above, next to Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year). Created just 48 hours ago with the goal of raising $250,000 for McCabe’s “legal defense fund,” it has already doubled that amount — to over $500,000 — and shows no sign of slowing down, as donations continue to pour in as of publication of this article.
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