Love him or hate him, Steve Earle has a history of stirring things up, whether on behalf of his anti-war or anti-death-penalty causes (go Steve!), or his manifold other causes.  Now, via his official video for new song Invisible (off his impending new album The Low Highway), comes yet another Steve Earle. Via the song and video, Earle rightly (but not self-righteously) lambasts those of us (guilty) who treat as invisible the destitute folks that wander our towns and cities.

If we may throw on the hair shirt for a moment, here’s how it works at the glass house known as Chez Lefort.  At times we use the excuse that we simply don’t know these folks and there are lots to know and too many tasks to be done.  At others, we use the excuse that we’ve seen these same folks around town time and again, and nothing ever changes.  And nothing ever changes.

Continuing a long line of artists, writers and troubadours that have depicted and reminded of the downtrodden in need of empathetic souls, Steve Earle reminds of the effort owed in his new song/video Invisible. It can take “An angel bendin’ down, to whisper in your ear.”

Earle’s song and video follow last month’s release by Helado Negro (Robert Carlos Lange) of the stirring Dance Ghost video (see at bottom) that caused us to look around and see a separate spectral subculture (the immigrants in our communities) in need of the human touch.  We all need those reminders.

So this weekend, be ye on State Street or Martin Luther King Avenue, or out in front of that Rescue Mission, skip the blinders and look up from that apparat glass, and see.  And as John Prine wrote a long-time back (about yet another sequestered subset):  “Say ‘Hello in there.  Hello.'”