Conscious Choice: Facial Acupuncture

February 2006 | Choice Feedback

Facial Acupuncture

At the end of your excellent article, Turin said Eastern people work on prevention many years before but there were no further details. I wondered if you would be able to ask her how Eastern people begin to work on prevention & anti-aging. By the article’s end I was extremely curious about what the Eastern people do to take “such good care of themselves,” what ways their prevention/anti-aging strategies differ from Western methods, and what makes them more effective? (if, in fact, they are). Thank you for your article and I look forward to learning (more.)

— Helen Stanislawski, Internet

Editor’s Note: We have received numerous phone calls and email requests for contact information that was inadvertently left out of the Acupuncture Facelift story in the January 2006 issue of Conscious Choice. Contact Larisa Turin at 312-399-4919 or visit chicagoacupuncture.com. Her address is 1150 N. State St., Chicago and 1535 Lake Cook Road, Northbrook.

Slow Zones

AS A 39-year-old male living on the North Side of Chicago, I was fortunate to pick up Conscious Choice in my Lake Shore Drive high-rise lobby. After reading Bob McCray’s article about the speed trap, I knew I wasn’t alone in this crazy world of “quick, fast, right away”.

Since the year 2000, I have learned the art of patience. Each and every day, I see people rushing to get who knows where. Motorists lack the decency of stopping at the stop sign. Others try to beat the traffic signal, only to kiss the face of a Metra train.

There’s much truth to the fact that rushing causes poor health. How our society got here is not a guess. Many people drink coffee in excess, morning, noon and night. They complain that they don’t get enough sleep, therefore their health suffers. It’s not their bed, it’s excessive consumption. They over-medicate themselves to compensate for this symptom until their central nervous system becomes irritated. Everyday routines become disrupted and disorganized. I’m not a doctor, nor am I unaware.

Bob McCray’s word, velocitize, meaning “To cause a person to become used to a fast speed,” is accurate. Anyone can become used to anything if they ignore the warning signs. Caffeine, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, etc. So, as a reader, where do you fit in? Take a look at the speed trap. I think it’s a lot better to get a moving violation in a speed trap than to waste a life on it.

— Nicholas Veterni Jr., Chicago, Ill.

Bag the Blue

THIS PAST December, you may have been invited by the City of Chicago to support its upcoming Christmas-tree-for-blue-bag exchange, “Turn Green into Blue.”

We invite you to join us in achieving the opposite, and turn “blue into green,” by asking the City to end its failed blue-bag program and initiating a “green” multi-bin, source-separated recycling program citywide.

Mayor Daley has made a good deal of progress in regards to the environment, but we all know there is still much to be done. Certainly, poor recycling is one of the key issues keeping Chicago far short of its goal of becoming a “green city.” After hundreds of millions of misspent tax dollars, Chicago’s residential recycling rate is only 8 percent, the lowest since 1996, and far less than half that achieved by New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. One-third of the city’s residential waste is being hauled directly to transfer stations, without ever being sorted. And less than 1 percent is being composted.

The city has stopped defending the blue bag, knowing that mixing garbage and recyclables will never succeed. But it appears unwilling to commit itself to change. You may know Ald. Joe Moore (49th) will be introducing an ordinance into City Council for Streets and Sanitation to implement a source-separated recycling and composting program for all 50 wards over the next three years.

Recycling, after all, intersects with resource conservation, pollution prevention, and global warming, and Chicago is simply not doing its part. Please use our website at chicagorecycling.org as a resource for the latest news as well as for a wide range of recycling information.

— Betsy Vandercook, President, Chicago Recycling Coalition

Dispatch from Iraq

Editor’s Note: Chicago-area resident Anita Stiegler is part of a humanitarian effort in Iraq, where she, as a member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), is attempting to facilitate the process of making peace in the war-torn country. This excerpted email to friends explains how her team is coping with the recent kidnapping of peacekeepers. Some names have been changed to initials.

WHAT DO you do to get people released by kidnappers? How do you know the kidnappers are who they say they are? How do you know what they want to hear in order to encourage them to release our friends? How do we get those who’ve spoken on our behalf to do more?

And what do you ask them to do? How do you encourage others who may have some influence to become engaged? How do you contact them? How do you know who the most influential people will be when you are not certain what the kidnappers want?

How do you learn how to use the press wisely? Should we go before the cameras and reveal our faces? How do you treat a TV crew who shows up at 2 a.m. in front of your apartment building with a police escort to shoot video of our location? How do you keep your landlady from shooting them?

We make phone calls, we answer questions from media via telephone. We write letters of thanks to the people and organizations who have supported us. In morning meetings we brainstorm “other” strategies as though we had a clear one. We write messages to our teammates and to their “hosts” and post them on the CPT website.

We listen to small arms fire. We curse low-flying helicopters. We talk about how many Iraqis are kidnapped and how no one pays much attention except their families. We wait and wait ….

We speak 3 times a day with the team in Canada, once a day with the team in Amman, intermittently with the teams in Hebron and al Tawani. We wash our clothes, cook our meals, clean our apartment, write reflections for CPT Net, figure out our expenses.

We thank our Iraqi friends continuously for standing by us and continuing to work with us. Their presence with us puts them in real danger. We continue to shop in the market and when we walk down our street our neighbors ask about our teammates — have we heard, has anyone called, what are we doing? It’s the same in the markets and grocery stores.

Every conversation with everyone revolves around this kidnapping. It reminds me of how much all our talk used to revolve around conditions here. There is no escape from either this place or this kidnapping. What we do, along with other Iraqis, is try to think our way through and around the stupidity of daily violence, intermittent presence of water and electricity, long delays in traffic and bad, bad air. And we enjoy and are humbled by offerings of graciousness and friendship from so many Iraqis.

How do you respond to U.S. press reports criticizing our presence here? Proof of our “recklessness” is the kidnapping of our four teammates. How do you react to Rush Limbaugh who says “… I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality.” What makes him think there’s even one leftist feel-good hand-wringer here? What kind of man “likes” the suffering of others? How is the reality of over 2000 dead, over 15,000 wounded Americans and a much greater number of dead and wounded Iraqis working for him? Why does he accept the consequences of war?

And a final question which begs answering — do we have the right to advocate a message of peace if we are not prepared to pay the cost of nonviolent peacemaking?

— Anita Stiegler, Iraq

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