Hopefully, the retailers of America took in the billions they so desperately need to transform their ledgers from red to black.

It is good for America to have a booming holiday gift-buying economy. Where the American motto once declared, “What’s Good For General Motors Is Good For America”, today it reads, “What’s Good For Walmart and Target Is Good For America.”

Well, really, China.

Nevertheless, Christmas shopping makes the American world go round.

Hours after our annual day of feasting, the American appetite turns its eyes on iPhones and iPads and PlayStations. Hopefully, a few Lionel Trains will be sold.

Yet, I cannot help thinking about the forgotten people whose shopping doesn’t even take place in the commonest of bargain basements. For there are nearly 600,000 Americans, who can not shop, nor do they have a place to call home.

Our infrastructure needs mending. Our healthcare system has its flaws. But nowhere are the greatest of inequities of American life revealed than in the dire lives of those living on our streets and alleys. In all the misery that Dickens could depict about nineteenth-century England, 582,000 souls walk amongst us with nowhere to go and no one to offer solace.

These people probably did get fed yesterday but not in their home, nor was it a meal they prepared for themselves.

It just doesn’t seem right that a country as wealthy as ours has so many living in such desperation.

It’s a thought that doesn’t get you into the jolliest of holiday spirits. But it’s a thought we should have every day.