If the detention of students condemning genocide is not a station of the cross I don’t know what is. Thousands of us assembled in Somerville near Tufts University in solidarity with Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts graduate student, who we must remember aside many other detained by ICE including asylum seekers unable or intimidated to play the role of a prisoner of conscience. My family, residents of Somerville have typically experienced the corner of Tufts Triangle as a place to play soccer, afterwards walked around Powderhouse Square in some kind of exercise and play, but that evening, as a family living in the midst of tyranny,  we were engaged in a civic belonging, grateful for community . Many of us activated to the emergency protest had heard about the detention of Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Kahlil whose wife Noor Abdulla, certainly comes today before our confessing hearts. Noor, which means “light” in Arabic, attests to the strength of the mourning women. In Luke’s Gosp...

    In Rosa Lee, Washington Post reporter Leon Dash follows the li ves of one family enduring intergenerational trauma and coping with extreme poverty . She sits dignified in a jacket photo, holding a military portrait of a son. “Rosa Lee—that name made me—Wait she’s black. She looks like my mom,” said an unhoused person taking refuge at the Somerville Housing Coalition Engagement Center. The supportive housing search person three times looped back to asking about his housing search, adjusting, acknowledging, offering help right there . He was waiting to hear a definite about the Y. It was just too much, a hundred dollars a day. “Oh, yeah, the hotel,” the Mets fan said . “How long is the wait in Somerville?” Two years. As indicated by the subtitle, Rosa Lee is a mother in urban America. I brought it with me to an appointment with Hannah who had facilitated a conversation in May with Tracy Kidder and Dr. Jim O’Connell of the Boston Healthcare for the Homeless, the su...

  “We’re upset. We’re not sleeping well” said a woman at last night’s meeting in Davis Square ( GOVTV ). She held a list of 39 names of people who had waited in the hallway in overflow from a 200 capacity crowd hosted by Pastor Lee at the Somerville Community Baptist Church. "The problem isn't homelessness, it's a drug issue. It's people shooting up at 7 in the morning, and having sex on the bench at 8 am." "We've just had Multiple stabbings within weeks," said a 21 year resident who  had witnessed a seachange in the past year. --"How did it get to this point--why was their eye off the ball?" In the past seven weeks, 674 patrols were made in Davis Square area, a 286% increase of police activity in the same period last year. Arrests made after dispute between two known to each other, detained September 26. Then a death in Statue Park on September 30, "So far deemed non-suspicious," said Deputy James Donovan. Followed by another dis...