Sir: My wife and I moved to Chatham late in 2015. The move took us a long way from our families and friends, but with rising rent and Toronto’s relentless expansion driving the price of more central properties out of our reach, we were out of time and options.
I’d like to state up front that there are some great people here – people who honestly care about the less fortunate, and whose time and charity I am grateful for. Chatham has a dark side, though, which is really wearing into my soul lately.
For one thing, there are a disproportionate number of psychopathically entitled and/or oblivious motorists here, making driving a high-stress exercise in predictive hyper-vigilance. It’s not fair that responsible drivers should have to take up this much slack from lawless, belligerent yahoos.
And then there’s the Municipality’s pet railway running across the back of my yard, carrying the mad ambition of shipping tens (hundreds?) of thousands of tonnes of highly toxic and explosive chemicals to an imaginary fertilizer plant directly through a residential area on a track so dilapidated that derailment is a massively fatal inevitability.
Less obvious, though, is the predation of low-income neighbourhoods by thieves. This summer my bicycle was stolen from our locked shed. That the shed padlock was broken with bolt cutters proves that this was premeditated, not a crime of opportunity.
Our neighbour informed me that her shed has been broken into twice. I’ve installed a security light in the back yard since then, but it did nothing to stop someone from brazenly stealing my wife’s holiday light display from our front lawn recently. More disturbing is the evidence the thief left that they were looking into our windows, casing our home possibly for a future break in.
It’s profoundly hurtful, knowing that someone out there has such disregard for our rights and well being that they’ll sell them for a few bucks. It’s hurtful that the police seem to take so little interest in petty crime that all I can do is fire off a report into cyberspace with no evidence that anyone has read or ever will read it.
The computer which I am using to write this letter is 10 years old, and I’m still paying for it: If this scumbag steals it when he comes back, I won’t be able to replace it, and I’ll lose my connection to the rest of the world. What then?
Why am I not allowed to feel safe in my own home? I don’t know where I could possibly go, but right now I just want to live anywhere but Chatham.
Michael Balls
Chatham
