Video of Cotton: 16 years homeless & disabled, “Brutal and senseless”

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From Mark Horvath at InvisiblePeople.tv:

“Brutal and senseless.”

This is how Cotton describes homelessness. It might just be the most succinct and heart-breakingly accurate explanation I’ve heard in a long time.

Cotton is homeless and disabled. She lives in a tent in Greensboro, NC. If that’s not bad enough, she has been living this way for over 16 years….

Cotton is one of my favorite people. She tells it like it is. She’s tough as nails, but she’s surprisingly generous and thoughtful. (Remember the planters she gave me and Audrie?) She’s funny and real. She’ll make you laugh out loud one minute and bring you to tears the next. She’s smart. She keeps a stack of books by her bed, and when she finishes a good one, she offers it to you to read.

Cotton’s life story takes more than three minutes of video to tell, and like most everybody else I’ve ever met, her story has a lot of layers. But you can simplify it down to this: She’s a disabled woman living in a tent in the woods, and something’s really wrong with that.  The Greenway will soon be coming through the woods she’s camping in. There ought to be a way to get Cotton out of those woods and into a place of her own — before the bulldozers come.

This video was made by Mark Horvath during the Greensboro stop of the InvisiblePeople.tv Road Trip USA, sponsored locally by Quaintance-Weaver, and donors Ed Cone, Salvage America, and RecycleBills.com. Thank you, all!