Sunday, February 9, 2014

Tow #18: How to Help the Homeless

This article, How to Help the Homeless, was featured in the Economist and it is about Hungary's homeless problem. In Budapest, homeless people camp out in very public places, and they even use landmarks as their restrooms. This problem is getting very severe and the city council passed a regulation law which outlaws "habitual living" in public places. This is becoming very controversial because homeless people refuse to live in the public shelters because they do not want their belongings taken away from them. They say they would rather live on the street. The purpose of this article was to raise awareness of what is going on in Hungry and to call to action that something has to be done about the homeless people.
The context this was written is, is present day because this is going on right now. I think this was written for the government in Hungry for a call to action. And the authors of this editorial remain anonymous because according to the website, it allows for the many writers to "speak in a collaborative voice." I think this is really interesting because it adds credibility with this really famous magazine and a bunch of authors who's opinions coincide.
This article uses a lot of rhetorics, but the main one is imagery, "Homeless people pull down their trousers and underwear in full view of startled tourists before relieving themselves on the pavement near parliament." This descriptive picture of the situation in Budapest really trigger's the audience's emotions and tells that something needs to be done about this situation. Also this this article appeals a lot to emotions because of the brutal winters, "As winter bites, sympathy for the homeless is more widespread than might be expected." This makes the audience feel bad for the homeless and it makes them want to do something about their situation.
I think this article was very well written with a lot of emotion, and statistics and imagery to trigger the emotions and if I were the audience, I would definitely want to do something about the homeless situation.

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