The Importance of Civility

            Today in an era of globalization, when our ability to interact with people of diverse backgrounds constitutes both a personal and community asset, many of us live our lives without creating a sense of social comfort for ourselves or within our communities. And we age without understanding our need to socially interact with others. We simply survive without deliberately considering the comfortable feeling that a smile, a nod, and/or a brief friendly chat creates within our communities, while secretly finding reasons not to socially interact with the people around us. Some of our reasons for not interacting socially are no time, no gain, no interest, fear of rejection, fear of making a mistake, fear of the unknown, fear of the known, other person’s defects, and never even noticing the other person exists. And perhaps we forgot that people are interactive by nature.

            Three of the actual reasons that we don’t interact socially are that we don’t know how to interact, we don’t know how to feel comfortable in the presence of others, and we don’t want to interact when there is no obvious reason for the interaction. Unfortunately, most of us do not know that regular social interaction can improve a person’s health, and we do not care that social isolation can lead to victimization, which is very costly to our communities in terms of monetary cost as well as loss of healthy social capital. In addition, we do not recognize that free friendly social interaction is known to spread a sense of comfort and well being within the community.

            Furthermore, very few of us at this point in time are specifically emphasizing the importance of comfortable day-to-day social interaction, the benefits derived from it, and the effects the lack of it has on us and our communities, although social scientists discussed the importance of social skills in the 1960s. As a result, there is really no reason for us to spontaneously think about what our interactions mean to us and others on a community level, and there is no reason for us to courteously interact with others at home and in public.

            The six purposes of this book are:

                     (1)   to inform people that contributing to their communities through the use off smiles and common courtesies provides a pervasive sense of  comfort, which can spread throughout the community, for free;

                     (2)   to foster comfortable social interaction with the introduction of the following three social interaction techniques:

                                    ( a )  cue, clue and aim;

                                    ( b )  observe, ponder, and adapt; and

                                    ( c )   clarity through clarification and classification.

                     (3)  to encourage ‘other awareness’ through civil/courteous/polite  conduct in and away from home;

                     (4)  to discourage social isolation or lack of social interaction;

                     (5)  to reduce victimization through the use of the three Cs: Choice, Charm and Chutzpah, which means that a person deliberately chooses to interact with another person, char