I was on the Tram this morning travelling to work. Now before I carry on with this I do realise that public transport seems to be a running theme throughout 90% of my blogs at the moment, but that is because unfortunately public transport is a huge part of my life at the moment, a part that drives me extremely insane, but at the same time allows you to observe and think about things. It almost makes it all worthwhile (Ha!). So anyway I was taking my life into my own hands by travelling on the Tram in the first place. There seems to be something extremely unsafe about them, but maybe that’s just me.

Here in Manchester in the mornings they put free newspapers on public transport so people can have the joy of reading the news whilst on the way to work. Quite a good idea. Anyway I was sat across from this woman who was reading a newspaper. I am one of these annoying people who never gets a newspaper of her own and then finds something really interesting whilst looking at someone else’s. So I caught sight of the front page headline that just got me, it went on along the lines of….“Cut crime, give junkies Heroin”. Amazing…I think they maybe onto a winner with that one. The first thing that struck me about that was, why don’t we just go the whole way and make crime completely legal, that will really drop the figures!

Now I don’t mean to be difficult, and I understand the sentiment behind these things. Drugs are an addiction and it’s not easy to come off them, and people need help. I just think it’s a little like moving the goal posts. Instead of tackling the problems they are just making things a bit easier, and it is something to make the crime figures look a bit better. You see that’s what they have to go off. In two years time they will be able to say look how much drug related crimes has dropped since we have brought this in. Well of course they will! All you did was make it legal. That’s called avoiding a problem instead of tackling it. Crime isn’t an easy thing to get on top of, and we are never ever going to have perfect figures. I think we have to accept that. But we can make things better, and that isn’t by making everything legal. Just so the numbers add up.

We are not statistics and we are not numbers on a piece of paper. People in power get caught up with that far to much sometimes. Maybe that makes it easier for them to reach some of the decisions they do, because we aren’t really real, just numbers on a piece of paper. They have to remember that isn’t the case there are real people behind these numbers. Real emotions and feelings, real lives, and I think that it is time to remember that. People have problems for reasons, maybe we need to get to the route of that before we start solving the problems. The world isn’t always a nice place, but we have the ability to make things better. It is not about making things look good. It’s about making things good. How it looks doesn’t matter. It’s the people behind it all that matter. Lets not forget that.