Turn on the Lights!

Sabrina Hernandez

Joy Sterrantino

ENGL 1010-21

27 October 2011

Turn On The Lights!

Coming from a big city in California, there were always lights everywhere you go. Streetlights, porch lights, and stoplights everywhere! Just last year I moved up here to Cedar City, Utah for college. I was so excited to be starting college and just being able to be on my own. Before my parents said their tearful, heartbreaking goodbyes to me they told me to be careful walking at night, because there was rarely any street lights in this city, and warned me about the dangers of walking at night by yourself. Like any teen would do they would just say, “Yeah okay, will do” and never really think about the dangers and consequences of walking at night, and that’s what I did. Now that I am a sophomore I reside in a house with a couple of my friends and we seriously live in one of the creepiest, darkest, eerie neighborhoods I’ve seen. I believe that Cedar City needs to fix the streetlights situation for the safety of pedestrians and the convenience and benefit of drivers. I believe that addressing these problems to the city as well as to the community should help convince both to look through this situation and possibly correct the issue being addressed.

Scary movies such as the Halloween movies with Michael Myers, portray some scenes of walking home at night with rarely any street lights on and a lonesome teen is being watched from close by and you can tell by her expressions that she has a bad feeling walking in the dark on the sidewalk. In the mists of night with no one around all of a sudden the teen sees a man in a beat up, bloody hockey mask coming towards her and the next thing she knows she is killed. Even though it’s just a movie and things like this don’t really happen in real life but the truth is no one really ever knows what could happen walking in the darkness at night with rarely any streetlights. Everything from getting hit by a car or having your child get kidnapped, I feel that setting up more streetlights can help in neighborhoods and make the community feel much safer and protected when walking around at night. Although many say that Cedar City is a very safe city, I believe that there is no such thing because crime is being committed everyday. It may not be high in some cities but nobody knows when crime will happen; it’s unpredictable. So when locals say that Cedar City is a safe city its hard to believe. Just last week one of my roommates almost hit a couple walking across the street as she was driving home. She explained that she didn’t see them cross and that it was too dark to see that they were right next to her. For reasons such as safety and the dangers of not having