the Middle East vs. Europe

I've been travelling the Middle East for almost 10 weeks. You don't hear anything good about this region in the mass media: mafia in Georgia, faked elections in Armenia, nuclear bomb in Iran, terrorist in Iraq, army regime in Turkey, etc. And I feel safe. I feel good. I eat their food, I hitch-hike their cars, I sleep in their beds, I see their work & their schools, I play with their kids, I share with them their hobbies. And I still feel good and safe.

All the time I meet good people who want to help me (even if their help it's the last thing I want cause I perfect manage myself alone). Nobody helped me when I got robed in Catalonya, nobody was interested in me when I was sleeping on streets in Portugal. In Europe I was taken home by completely strangers maybe 5 times during my whole entire life (& half of them were Maroccans), in the Middle East it happened to me many times already.
Paradoxically but very often I found these people more open-minded & more friendly than us, Europeans.

I was looking for an answer what makes the EU a good place for living. We delude ourselves that it's a good education, a high culture or an economical power but it's not true. Not anymore. I find young people here the same well educated, ambitious and curious of the world around.

If something makes me scary, it's the poverty - the demon of hopelessness. But when you see in the TV a photo of an Iraqi old man in the strange clothes screaming something against America, remind post-soviet villages in Poland, the Portuguese interior, Barcelona city centre, slums blocks districts in the UK, the Gypsies in Slovakia or the horse carts on the transit roads in Romania. How many people in our own land don't have proper access to education? Or just electricity or water? They are people who are too simple to change their life or even complain aloud about their own fate. The poverty makes people stupid, not the religion nor the culture.

If something can make the EU a better place to live, it's only the high ethic & law standards. It's the feeling and deep conviction of being sure about that the police is for my own safety, being sure that I'll never be forced to pay a bribe, being sure that your child will not be treated worse than a rich child, being sure that my savings & my business are safe against mafia or the government.

I want to live in the country of law, solidarity & equal chances. But when I read about another country's bankruptcy in the euro zone or the last idea of David Cameron, I leave my faith in Europe.