saving face

Saving Face in Eastern Cultures – Do Our Diplomats Get It?

The above title may not send me to the forefront of search engines. I am neither a sociologist nor anthropologist. I’ll never understand how geologists and forensic paleontologists can tell one rock or bone from another. I did, however, interview the late anthropologist, Dr. Margaret Mead when she was in Washington, D.C. for a World Health Organization conference. it was the highlight of my Washington experience when we met at her hotel.

In her late seventies, the legendary Mead had gone through three marriages like a hot knife through butter. The feisty anthropologist could charm you one minute, and seconds later splatter you with potty mouth language. I didn’t care. she was mine for two hours.

Once I got over my initial jitters we settled into a somewhat congenial conversation about the reasons for her attendance at the conference: the status of women in Third World countries. by living with them, Mead had spent a lifetime studying child rearing and the role of women in primitive societies. Her first three books were Bestsellers: Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing up in new Guinea, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. at age nine, I’d discovered the latter among my older brother’s books. Assuming I’d stumbled onto some torrid stuff to share with my pals, you can imagine our disappointment when reading Dr. Mead’s textbook conclusions that young Samoan girls tended to have casual sex with men until the time they married. Considered shocking when she wrote it in the 1930s, it was no more scandalous than her own personal life.

Christian missionaries have since transformed most primitive peoples, at least on the surface. I say on the surface because we in the West tend to see things through our own lenses. Always the teacher, Dr. Mead told me, No doctorate degree is going to teach you about any society or its people until you live, eat and sleep with them. Those who knew her would tell you she did all three.

We have only to look at examples of other cultures to know that Mead was right. When I lived in Nairobi, Kenya near the edge of a deep forest, I went to sleep at night to the sound of distant drums. Teenage circumcision of girls and boys was against the law. But everyone knew what the drums meant. although their Harvard educated diplomats will deny it, these ceremonial rites persist today in many African cultures.

In 17th century Japan, a Samurai lived by a strict code of honor and loyalty to his lord. Honor (and acquiring wealth) was what he lived and died for. as modern as we perceive Japan today, saving face, honor and loyalty remain fixed in the Japanese character.

Saving face is essential in Eastern cultures. an Oriental will tell a Westerner what he thinks the Westerner wants to hear. he believes it is better to placate the stranger than to offend by displeasing him. a follower of Islam will do likewise. Anyone who has spent time in these countries knows this to be true. a follower of Islam comes from a tribal desert culture of antiquity. he will not dishonor his family or his tribe. Lebanese President Emile LaHud and his Prime Minister, Najib MIKATI, belong to an honor culture that adheres to saving face. The evidence is clear in the United States. ever wonder why the American Islamic community is not more vocal about the evil doers? It’s not because they condone wanton murder.

It is the job of Western diplomats to understand and work with diplomats of cultures foreign to them-to see through a different lens. How else can seemingly impossible solutions be obtained in an equitable manner? Equitable meaning, you do this for me, I’ll do that for you, not to you. ever purchase a carpet in a Middle East bazaar? if you plunk down your money without haggling, they think you are a first class moron. first you sit and drink some mint tea; talk about your kids and the price of oranges. Incidentally, in order to settle an insult, the Samurai did their own tea thing before a major battle.

On the other hand, militant proxies like Hezbollah have no country and no rich culture. under the guise of protectors of the innocent, they happily fall on their swords to take humanity back to the heady days of the Taliban. Hezbollah, Al Quaeda, Hamas and the rest of the alphabet soup are a disgrace to their ancestors and all followers of true Islam. whether poverty or hopelessness, whatever evil thing gives birth to terrorists is for another Margaret Mead to ponder.

The Europeans are good at giving advice when it serves their own interests, i.e. the French. But they’re reluctant to stick out their necks when the chips are down on the Lebanon/Israei border. The United Nations is a peacetime aid organization. The U.S. Administration is clueless. It’s difficult but not impossible to see through someone else’s glasses. as the leader of the free world keeps telling us, It’s hard work.

Simplicity-Courage-Humor-Soul

Saving Face – Low Impact Face Lifts That Avoid Knives

Face it. Time and ageing create wear-and-tear lines, wrinkles, sun damage, sagging skin and unruly lumpy fat deposits on what was your taut and smooth skinned youthful face in your teens and 20s.

Yes, you can go radical.reverse gravity’s pull.and submit to the surgeon’s knife for a full-blown skin tightening and feature-altering face lift. but tuck-and-lift procedures, although delivering dramatic and instant results, carry no small element of psychological unease along with very important health risks related to scarring, healing, infection, down time from work, to name just a few. And, virtually unspoken, is the fear what if my surgeon makes a mistake.and I don’t like the way I look? What then?.

There’s no one simple solution, nor any guaranteed technique that works uniformly on all women and men. however, the buzz in many conversations concerns the growing advance of virtual face lift technologies, treatments that you can undergo which deliver skin tightening results, yet avoid the surgeon’s knife altogether

Face Lift Option #1: High Tech Laser Skin Tightening. OK, laser seems to be popping up everywhere, from guiding satellites to performing precision engineering. however, the gradual sideways advance of laser from general surgery into skin care has been a marvel in technology evolution.

Offering sophisticated calibration for energy control, new laser-light face lift therapies, such as the Titan treatment, carefully heat up the interior collagen tissue layers of the patient’s skin.stimulating a bio-chemical response that tightens up the skin. except for a faint sense of heating up, the laser face lift is pain-free. Sun spots or surface unevenness or rough dry skin are unaffected by laser.

Most people need two to three treatments, spaced about 1 month apart in order to get to a point where the maximum face lift results are created. this multi-treatment strategy, which allows for the body to react, then stabilize, does confer a benefit in that you can clearly control the incremental changes to your appearance, unlike a surgical face lift where you’re stuck with whatever face the surgeon lifted. at $1,000 or more per session, laser face lifts like the Titan are not cheap.

Face Lift Option #2: Cosmetic Fillers. The simple matter of laughing, smiling, talking, eating, smoking, whatever over years creates an unique facial imprint.your looks with the stamp of time. sometimes this is good.mostly it results in fine lines, crinkles, crows feet or even deep furrows which increasingly defy creams and cosmetics.

Women and men have a range of effective options to create face lift like results. Collagen fillers or even fat fillers (harvesting your own fat, no less) constantly prove their effectiveness in filling-in low volume facial skin wrinkles. You can also choose synthetic fillers including Hylaform, Radiance, Restylane, Sculptra and others. Benefits? Lines and wrinkles can be filled-in. Treatments are lunch time quick. Costs are low, in the hundreds of dollars. but, your body will eventually re-absorb these fillers, so you’ll need future repeat treatment in order to hold your results.

Option #3: Contour Threads And Thread Lift. Thread lift has popularized itself as a half-step alternative.sitting midway between the laser and radio frequency face lifts techniques on one extreme and full-blown face lift surgery on the other. It’s true that a contour thread procedure requires a surgeon specialist. but this sort of procedure is as close to non invasive as you’ll get.yet it offer results that can hold for 3 to 5 years.

Here’s what’s involved in a typical thread lift face lift. Take a pin-prick size hollow-nose needle entry into one part of your face, near the upper cheek bone. Anchor a wee tiny thread to this location. Work the thread carefully under your skin to a second point about 4 inches away. Carefully extract the end of the thread. now gently pull on the thread. Presto your skin lifts.smoothens. Repeat this simple procedure about 4 times on each side of your face and your done.

Option #4: Acupuncture, Botox And others. Here we go again. The needles come out, yet you’re looking for face lift results with as little pain as possible. for a number of women, undergoing acupuncture is virtually pain-free. The treatment concept, evolved over thousands of years in Asia, concerns carefully placement of very fine needles.at key body energy points. Result and theory? The release of blocked energy can result in skin smoothening.a softening and skin tone improving result that is subtle, yet may be just the level of face lift needed by some women and men.

Last but certainly not least is Botox and its rapidly expanding universe of applications. Injections of Botox can help to relax facial muscles, thus releasing the underlying muscular tension that causes deep furrows and scowl-lines to appear with ageing. Botx treatments are relatively quick, economic and results can hold for many months until re-treatment is necessary.