At one of my restaurants, we have a manager who is from Russia. It took a few years before we were in sync to some degree, in the way we ran the business and handled customers. It was actually quite a fight until we saw shall we say, “eye to eye” and understood where each of us were coming from.

With the turmoil in the Ukraine and Crimea I’ve held my tongue as she is an avid supporter of Putin. What’s interesting is when I finally had the courage to say something sarcastic about Putin and Crimea, boy did she let into me. After the discussion, I have to say I am questioning my original thoughts. It’s an example of something I have discussed before. Here in the United States our news is filtered quite a bit.

Many of us may not remember or were not old enough to know that the Ukraine use to be part of Russia. In our conversation, Galina (our Russian manager) said that the separation that happened a long time ago was not actually legitimate. A lot of questions were raised after the fact. She stated that Crimea is like Florida where many people from Russia retired to. The majority of the population there was originally from Russia. One of the reasons the people in Crimea wanted to leave the Ukraine, is that the American equivalent to Social Security for those Russians who had worked all their years in the Ukraine was 4 times higher if they collected from Russia than from the Ukraine.

What bothers me now is how do we know what the truth is in evaluating this situation? Our filtered news we get each evening isn’t really helping us. It may do more damage actually in world wide relations with other countries. When we come to the table to discuss things because of our distorted views / opinions it hurts us. Maybe that’s why the United States isn’t liked much in many parts of the world.