‘Villens United by Chris Haskell

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

Black lives matter. Blue lives matter. ALL LIVES MATTER…

Over the last few weeks the media has been flooded with horrible images of innocent black men and innocent police officers being gunned down. While there is justifiable anger on both sides of this senseless violence, there are those in the media who are carelessly fanning the flames of rage and ignorance to push their own agenda. Instead of trying to shine a light on the problem and help unify our country they choose only to blame and further divide. Unfortunately one such media outlet is The Somerville News Weekly.

After the deadly police shootings in Dallas a couple weeks back, The Somerville News Weekly chose to print an anonymously written “letter to the editor” attacking the mayor for hanging a “Black Lives Matter” banner outside of City Hall.

The column was just more of the usual printed garbage that we’ve come to expect from The News Weekly. Along with their regular factual inaccuracies the column accused our Mayor Curtatone of disrespecting Somerville police and stated, “He needs to smarten the F&@# up,” and, “…needs to get his head out of his ass.” All the usual class and sharp insight you’d expect from them.

Ugh. Where to even begin…

This “letter to the editor” should never have been printed in the first place and any intelligent reputable newspaper editor would never print such hateful trash. In the past I’ve criticized The News Weekly in my column for the awful language, personal attacks, and utterly false news that they have such an affinity for printing. I’m under the assumption that the column was actually written by one of two ignorant men at The News Weekly (who also have a habit of using similar colorful language) and passed this off as a letter to the editor. “Throw Obama out of the White House”; “time for Trump”; sounds a lot like the usual opinions of a couple jerks who write for The News Weekly. Whoever the author, it is overwhelmingly clear that they don’t understand what the Black Lives Matter movement is all about.

The author of this “letter” paints the Black Lives Matter movement as being “a group that wants to kill cops,” which simply isn’t true at all. The Black Lives Matter movement stemmed from police unfairly targeting, arresting, and killing African American men in this country. The movement does NOT advocate the killing of police in anyway and only wishes to bring more attention to how unfairly African Americans are treated by police. Sure, some people who may have associated themselves with the movement have called for violence against police, but that does not mean that is what the Black Lives Matter banner stands for. The fear that African American parents have for their children’s lives if they are confronted by police is what the harmless Black Lives Matter slogan is all about.

Somerville has a large ethnically diverse population that keeps getting more diverse by the day. By hanging the banner at City Hall we are sending a message to the citizens of Somerville. While we honor and respect our city’s law enforcement and the fine job they do, the banner symbolizes an understanding of the problem of racial discrimination and injustice. The good people of Somerville will not tolerate it. Not in our city. In this way Mayor Curtatone tries to preserve the beautiful unity of Somerville. Ironic though that in attacking the mayor for this the author calls for a Trump presidency; which has waged the most divisive and ugly presidential campaign in modern US history.

The Somerville News Weekly is fairly predictable; so I fully expect a retaliation article full of vulgar insults against myself, the mayor, and whoever else “grinds their gears” over this subject. This column that you are reading now was born from my disgust with The News Weekly for their personal attack rants, vulgar language, and how they were representing our beloved city in general (and boy, did they attack me for it – ask me in person sometime and I’ll elaborate).

The publishers seem to care more about pushing their political agenda and airing personal grievances than actually reporting local news. It reads more like a tabloid rag than a community newspaper and has become an ugly stain on our city. Several high school students even went as far as organizing a public burning of their newspaper after they were outraged over a few offensive articles. After all, this is the same publication that printed an opinion article referring to the city of Somerville as a “village of idiots.”

So right here I’m officially extending an open invitation to James A. Norton and William Tauro to join me in studio for a future broadcast of my radio talk show The Villens Den on bostonfreeradio.com. It’s a live call in show and I welcome either of them on to discuss this Black Lives Matter banner further, our different opinions on how community newspapers should be operated or why what they view as being “politically correct” the rest of us see as just plain human decency.

Until that fateful day I’ll keep you informed in print or over the radio about all the fun interesting stuff going on in our city, and speaking out for all the people who make our great city one of the top places to live in the country.

Later ‘Villens … Lives matter. Banners don’t. Get over it