It's amazing how durable the message of A Christmas Carol is. No, not that a curmudgeonly misanthrope could be made to see the error of his ways — but that human beings are so guilty of neglecting the least among them.
As you can tell from nearly everything he wrote, Charles Dickens was appalled by the plight of the have-nots. Scrooge's protest of "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" echoes every time a privileged member of society protests that he needn't do more to alleviate the sufferings of his fellow human beings.
Similarly, how shocking and disgusting was the plight of Jackelin Caal Maquin, the seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died of dehydration and malnutrition in the custody of US Border Patrol. The circumstances of her death, while she was under the care of the United States, were positively — well, Dickensian. We cats put the blame for this girl's death squarely on Donald Trump, and we HISS.
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