"...After all, I was a French history major and this is where King Louis XIV plotted his empire.
It's where the National Assembly met just before launching the French Revolution.
It's where the treaty to end World War I was signed.
But as I just led my kids through the chandelier-ensconced Hall of Mirrors, the king's gold-etched chambers and ornate, statue-lined gardens, I turned to my husband.
"I kind of feel sick," he said, reading my mind.
The ostentatiousness was just too much this time — a sentiment that was painfully expressed 226 years ago by thousands of Frenchmen who couldn't even afford bread.
That, of course, is one reason why Louis XVI lost his head in the Revolution, thus becoming the last Bourbon monarch to reside in Versailles.Certainly, much progress has been made in the western world since the last days of feudalism.
That's undeniable.
But when I read that more American children are living in poverty today than during the Great Recession, it gives me pause.
Because that most certainly isn't progress.
And if a society is to be judged based on how we treat the most vulnerable, we are failing.
More than one in five children are poor — that's 18.7 million kids, up from 17 million in 2008.
And 524,000 live in Michigan — where Republicans are poised to scrap the Earned Income Tax Credit, which will inevitably plunge thousands more into poverty.
How on earth is this acceptable?..."
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