NEWS JUNKIE POST
Mar 6, 2010 at 9:27 amHomeless: The Invisible People Among Us
Mark Horvath is on a personal mission: To give a voice and a face and tell the story of homeless people across America one at a time. Horvath is a documentary filmmaker, but has also experienced first hand the harshness of life on the streets when he hit rock bottom due to a drug addiction problem.
After lifting himself out of the streets and drawing on his painful personal experience Horvath decided to put the invisible among us in the limelight by doing short video clips of homeless people one at a time. He launched his web site Invisible People TV a while back, and his site is getting surprisingly high exposure thanks mainly to the social media network site Twitter.
His commendable work is finally getting the attention it deserves, and recently Ford Motor Company donated a vehicle to Mark Horvath to help him take his project on the road all across America.
“I once heard a story about a homeless man on Hollywood Boulevard who really thought he was invisible. It is not hard to comprehend this man slow spiral into invisibility. Once on the street, people started to walk past him, ignoring him as if he didn’t exist…much like they do to a piece of thrash on the side walk. I not only feel their pain, I truly know their pain. You would never know it now, but I was a homeless person. Fourteen years ago, I lived on Hollywood Boulevard,” says Mark Horvath.
Not only Mark Horvath is giving homeless people a face and a voice, but by doing so he gives them back a little bit of humanity and dignity, and even some hope. We should all emulate Mr. Horvath’s remarkable work, and start paying attention to the ones we do not want to see, because it is too painful for ourselves.
A day before the Hollywood circus of the “Rich & Famous” gather near by on Hollywood Boulevard for the Oscars dwelling on the limelight, we urgently need, as a community, to address the scandal of social injustice, unbearable despair and our broken social safety net. The invisible people need to be seen and to be heard by all of us, but foremost we must address this endemic and shameful problem, made even more acute by the recession, in a comprehensive policy manner on a local, state and federal level. Meanwhile, all of the people who are lucky enough to have a job and a roof above their heads, and look the other way when they see a homeless person stand morally guilty as charged.
To visit Mark Horvath web site click here.
Editor’s Note: Please follow The News Junkie Post on Twitter. All photographs by Gilbert Mercier. To view additional Mercier’s photographs click here.
Oh, man. Gilbert this is a wonderful report. Thanks for writing it up and providing the link to Horvath’s project. I’m passing this one on to some social worker friends of mine.
Wow, what a powerful and compelling website! The warning: “some content may be offensive. Our hope is you’ll get mad enough to do something” is brilliant. The photos and stories are very profound. Will talk about/prtomote link on the radio later. Thanks, Gilbert, for giving this growing epidemic exposure–especially on the eve of all that Hollywood excess. Truly a modern day “Tale of Two Cities.”
Here’s a relevant article – http://www.thenewstribune.com/2010/03/01/1091006/we-are-not-the-walker-but-all.html
And here’s an excellent study of US cities that crimilaize homelessness, while passing laws that inflame the systemic problem of homelessness, itself:
http://www.nlchp.org/content/pubs/2009HomesNotHandcuffs1.pdf
Thank you for posting this great link, Stephen!