Mayor Nick Isgro clearly cares about Waterville and has worked well with those who wish to revitalize our city. Like everyone else, he has said many things he ought to regret. Regrettably, though, his lack of impulse control, combined with the invention of Twitter, has lured him into ignoring the distinction between public and private. So now the mayor’s crude, immature, and uncompassionate remarks have reached tens of thousands of people in Maine and beyond.

Instead of copping to the obvious — that his tweet was insensitive and hurtful — he has defended his words less on their merit — of which they have none; they were meant as an insult — than as an example of free speech, a right that he doesn’t seem to fully understand. The mayor has indeed exercised lawful free speech, but free speech doesn’t exempt him from the consequences of mean-spirited free speech.

We can say or think whatever we want privately, but once we go public, we have to take responsibility for what we say. So the mayor regards himself as free to trivialize and misrepresent current events and to hurl a junior high-level barb at a high school student while publicly dragging our city into the dirt.

As part of his defense, he blames elites and outside agitators, a defense strategy weaker even than free speech. But it wasn’t outside agitators who wrote “Eat it, Hogg.” What if one of his children told him to “eat it” and, when confronted, blamed it on the top-ranking member of Waterville’s government?

It’s time for Mayor Isgro to step up and apologize. Or resign. Or face impeachment.

Peter Harris

Waterville

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