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A call for vigilance
?Zephyr resident Colleen McBroom’s letter on this page reiterates a few things we already knew about vandalism in Uxbridge:
• It’s not just an urban problem. There have been ugly incidents in Sandford, Udora and Leaskdale within the last couple of years.
• It’s a heartbreakingly mindless crime. People who have absolutely no interest in contributing anything positive to their community, instead spend their time destroying the good works of others. It’s bad enough when they desecrate storefronts or public buildings, but when they tear down what people have volunteered their own precious spare time to build, they rip the very heart out of what makes the community good. And when it happens over and over again, as it has with the York Durham Heritage Railway, you’re very sorely tempted to just pack up your community spirit and go away.
• It’s a complicated crime with a complicated solution, or it’s a simple crime with a simple solution. Take your pick. What’s complicated is figuring out the motivation, and figuring out the punishment, because if you go about it the wrong way, you could turn a petty criminal into somebody much worse. What’s simple is that it’s easily preventable, because 95% of vandalism happens in front of our very eyes. And the solution is simply to be more watchful.
We already know that Uxbridge is under-policed, and if that’s the case for Brock Street, imagine the numbers for Zephyr, which is about as far away from Durham Police HQ as you can get, and still be in the Region. Do any of our readers remember whether vandalism was a problem when we had our own police force, pre-1973 when the Region was established? It would be interesting to dig up the statistics, but no matter how small the force was, it spent all its time on our own streets and highways, and because its members lived here, they knew the towns, knew the businessmen, knew the kids.
It’s relatively pointless, of course, to wax nostalgic about the good old days, because we’re not going back there, at least not any time soon. So what do we do? We act as our own police. Ms. McBroom says that someone on the other side of Zephyr Road watched the destruction of her husband’s rink. If they saw it, they could have stopped it, by gathering a couple of neighbours and chasing the yahoos away, by taking down licence plates and calling the police. By doing something, for Pete’s sake.
Someone saw the people smashing the windows in the railway cars, or toppling all the flower pots on Main Street, or spraying graffiti on the sheds at H.H.Goode. But they did nothing. We have to take responsibility for the well-being of our own communities. And in the coming municipal election, we have to ask the candidates what they’re going to do to stop the vandalism. Because it’s gone on long enough.
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Our pioneers keep leaving us. Just this past week, the remarkable Isabel St. John, who used to tell about serving sandwiches and lemonade to the men building the Foster Memorial as a teenager back in 1935, passed away only shortly after leaving her beloved home on Hwy. 47. Our sympathies to the St. John family; we’ll have a tribute to Isabel in next week’s Cosmos.
