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...

  Finally a date with my wife! But just to make it happen, both she and I wrestled with our demons and angels. In my case, Yesterday Thursday 7pm, mourning Somervillians for Palestine (S4P) were in my heart. Mourning--The immolation of Matt Nelson at the Israeli consulate in Boston. Mourning-- The shooting of Caleb Gannon, a pro-Palestinian Jewish lifelong Newton resident--allegedly by a man who had repeatedly harrassed S4P--including the daughter of a colleague of the Human Rights Commission on her way into Somerville High School. Mourning the failure of our Mayor to address the need of a plan for protest protection. All this heaviness as we proceeded to our date. We read James this coming Sunday at Mass--easily distorted into an abstraction on wisdom that begins and ends with purity. But today, our spaces map across and through global mess, and we are called into conversions of hope, daily persistant practices of love, solidarity, shouldering the reality of the oppressed. In her ...