The Daily Mail ran a story this week on musician Gary Numan and the difficulty he is having deciding whether to stay in Britain, a country he loves, or leave for the sake of his children in favour of a safer and more savoury life in the US.

Numan was a pioneer of electronic music and is still best remembered for his hit song, Cars. He says in the article that he always considered himself to be “fiercely patriotic” and had never entertained the thought of leaving Britain. That is until his wife Gemma and three young children had an unpleasant encounter with thugs.

Having moved his family to the Sussex countryside six years to avoid the roughness of Britain’s big towns and cities, he was horrified – and angry - to hear how a gang had surrounded Gemma and their children on the street one day and proceeded to shout lewd comments about what they would like to do to Gemma.

Now, Gary and Gemma are seriously considering moving to Santa Monica in California, where he says the people are relaxed and friendly, and there is little sign of the unpleasant binge-drinking, thug culture that prevails in Britain.

He explains: “When I'm touring, I get to see what life's like in different towns and cities. It's almost impossible to go anywhere now without encountering that thuggish element, people hanging around in the street shouting abuse.

“There's an undercurrent of violence and aggression and it seems to be fuelled by a binge-drinking culture which I don't see in other countries. The riots showed we have an ever-decreasing degree of compassion and care for other people. There's a greedy mentality based on self-gratification at any cost. It's a disappointing trend that has been growing in Britain for a long time and it bothers me.

“I've spent a lot of time in the United States and I'm not under any illusions that it's a crime-free nirvana. I'm well aware it has plenty of problems, though they seem to be associated with particular areas.

“In Santa Monica, the weather is lovely and there are beautiful beaches. When you ask teenagers for directions, they are helpful and polite, rather than surly and hostile. California doesn't seem to have the drinking culture we have here, either, which helps.”

As the story went to press, comedian David Walliams was battling his way down the sewage-filled Thames in the hope of raising money for charity. When “Thames Tummy” set in early on, the diarrhoea and sickness made the prospect of another 12-hour stretch in the water unthinkable.

Explaining what kept him going, the Little Britain star said it was the thought of letting people down and the money being raised for a good cause.

In the end, the bad tummy subsided and although exhausted beyond imagination, Walliams reached his final destination and emerged triumphant near Big Ben in Westminster. His incredible feat raised more than a million pounds, money which will now be spent on projects to benefit the poor in the UK and overseas through the Sport Relief charity.

No one would blame Gary Numan for moving to a place where he feels his daughters can grow up in a safe and positive environment. There are probably many people across Britain toying with that very idea right now! Yet there is an alternative: stay. Stay and try to make things better.

For every good guy who leaves, it’s harder for everyone else who stays and the challenge of putting things right only becomes greater. The fact that there are people who even feel troubled by the riots and other unsociable behaviour in our society means that something can still be done about it. It is a far more frightening prospect to contemplate Britain without any good role models left in it to set a better example or encourage a different way of living.

It was moving, inspiring and exciting to follow Walliams as he bravely swam 140 miles down a germ-infested river that most of us wouldn’t even dip our toes into, let alone swim face down in for 12 hours a day. The effect was to do so much more than raise money for charity. The sheer misery of it genuinely inspired people and as one lady who came out to see him said: “He’s made the country feel perky.”

Even Walliams admitted to being taken aback by the level of support he received, as crowds appeared to cheer and wave along the entire route. Granted, we don’t all have the fame and wealth of Walliams, but it is no less inspiring to see the impact that one person can make. After all, he didn’t have to do what he did, and if he didn’t do it, Sport Relief and the benefitting communities would be £1m worse off.

Milo Cress, from Burlington in Vermont, in the US, is another inspiring example. In February, he started petitioning restaurants in his home state to stop automatically putting plastic drinking straws into the drink orders. Why? Americans alone use around 500 million disposable straws each day, most of which are thrown away. It’s a needless waste that can harm the environment and wildlife. In the little over six months since he launched his campaign, Milo has been contacted by politicians and featured on Fox News and CNN. His campaign – Be Straw Free – has spread far beyond Vermont to other states around the US, and more and more restaurants are now pledging to ask customers first if they would like a straw instead of popping one straight into the glass. All this, and Milo is just nine-years-old.

Of course, Jesus himself is still the best example of someone who went through the unthinkable for people who were killing him, just to show the hugeness of God’s love to a hurting world. The effect of his short life, so overlooked and ridiculed during his time on earth, continues to touch, inspire, challenge and change countless lives around the world today.

We might not raise £1m, we might not change the nation overnight, but we might just inspire a neighbour, a friend, a street, a town, and that’s a start. Maybe, like Jesus, showing love to someone is all we need to do.

If we leave when things are at their toughest, then maybe we’ll miss that opportunity to bless someone who needed it, or - to borrow the popular phrase – to “be the change we want to see in the world”. Instead of allowing the troubling things we see to drive us out the country, perhaps they could drive us to start something new or to join in something already started by someone else. Surely that is true patriotism? Then like Walliams and like Milo, we may be surprised by the results, and the world – or at least our part of it – might just look a little bit different tomorrow from how it looked today.