The Edge, producer of Friday night's MTV special on youth homelessness, "The Break," says he, too, sometimes finds himself at a loss about how to help people on the street.
"There's that awful thing where you realize there's nothing you can do, right at that moment, so you kind of pretend they're not there," he told TheWrap. "And I think for somebody who's homeless, particularly someone who's panhandling, that's the most emotionally difficult thing, is to become like a non-person. Like you literally do not exist to someone walking by.
"And I understand both sides," he added. "The person passing by just doesn't know what to do. So they end up blanking the homeless person. And it's a terrible thing to see happen. I've been guilty of it myself from time to time."
The musician and activist, who says he usually does give money to the homeless people he encounters, has spent three decades working on social causes like African famine relief as a member of his band. U2, the biggest touring act of 2011, has campaigned for causes and organizations from Make Poverty History to Amnesty International.
With "The Break," the Edge and host Anne Mahlum, an advocate for the homeless, profile three young people on the street and try to help them rebuild their lives. They include a woman who was involved in abusive relationships, a gifted drummer who suffered a downward spiral, and a woman who left home because her parents objected to her lesbianism. The Edge also wrote a song for the show, "There's No Home Like Place."
The Edge said U2 is "slowly starting to think about work," but the band is in no rush to get back to the studio, despite a wealth of material. Instead, it's listening to a lot of music. After we talked about the special, he told us what he's playing lately.
What interested you about this project?
It was something that just inspired me early on. I was questioning myself about some of my own ways of relating or not relating to homeless people, and it just started me on kind of a journey to answer some questions for myself. And in the process I started thinking about the way that the homeless are really completely marginalized, and in many cases disenfranchised.
They suffer through a lot of stereotypical views about how they got there. What I've learned is there is a myriad of reasons why someone might become homeless. No two stories are the same. I thought that it was time that there was a little bit more of an intelligent sense of inquiry into this problem. It's particularly serious at the moment with the economic downturn.
I thought if we could really make a difference in somebody's life with an intervention, it could be a reality TV kind of thing that would be very uplifting and inspiring, instead of making people view the show and feel better because they see a lot of bad behavior.
But also if somebody's in a position of being homeless, in could be hopefully an inspiring thing to see.
The question of how to help is a particularly interesting dilemma for you. As part of U2 and singularly, you're one of the most approached people in the world to help contribute to causes. And you're also in a unique position to help a lot of people. How do you choose what you're going to do?
I think it's down to feeling like you can move the needle, that you can make a difference. And of course we can't do everything, because then you'd be so diluted that there wouldn't be any kind of impact to your support or involvement. That's an important thing.
And the things that inspire you and the things that you feel moved to become involved with. As with Bono and his Africa work. He happened to be in Africa at a very pivotal time in his life and witnessed a lot of the problems with famine. And it's stayed with him. For me, there was something about the homelessness issue that was like this voice just saying, you've got to try to find some way of getting involved here.
There were a couple of stories as well that sort of inspired me. One Irish homeless man, in Dublin, quite famously rescued the driver of a bus that had plunged into the River Liffey. And he and a passer-by actually climbed down though this wrecked bus because the front of it was in the water but the back of it was accessible from the bridge. And they climbed down through the broken rear window and dragged the bus driver out and saved his life. But he ended up wandering into the night with his wet clothes to sleep rough.
And it just struck me as a kind of really tragic scenario – I wasn't the only one. It was a big story in Ireland.
Not that you've ever suffered through the kinds of struggles that homeless people do, but as a child or when you were trying to get U2 started, was there a time when you felt like you lived close to the margins?
I mean, friends of ours, during the early days, we would hang out in derelict buildings … and all that stuff, which was kind of almost a rite of passage, particularly if you were coming out in a punk band, the punk movement. But no, personally, I can't lay claim ever having had to deal with not having a home. Although there are people I know who've had phases of being homeless, I'm not putting myself forward as an expert in homelessness.
