smiling eyes

Last night I shared a bus ride back home with Natalia, the Circus trapeze artist. She is from Russia and she has worked all over the world. She was telling me about the way people are in the different places she has been. She praised the people from North Korea. I was shocked. North korea? Yes, people smile with their eyes there, not like here, not like in Europe any more. Many things they say, they're not true, not everything is true.

One of the many things you learn when you travel is precisely this, nearly everything that you have been told by the mass media over the years is bullshit. And we take it. We believe it. We conform to the established view of the world not comparing it with our own experience of it, because of fear. One of the best things the mass media achieve is inducing fear in people, fear of other people, fear of their kind.

In the Soviet Union was like this before. Now Russia is like here. She finished with a sad tone in her voice. I got off the bus and strolled back home feeling that I knew what she meant. I had felt those warm smiling eyes too.