Your choices, charm, and chutzpah can revitalize your community.
In her first book, Bogorad reminds us that we are all social beings, who need to socially interact to thrive as individuals and to sustain strong communities. She shares with us the theory that social isolation leads to victimization and weakens our communities. And she warns us that social cannibalism may consume us if we continue to ignore our need and our obligation to socially interact with each other.
If you are a person whose community has been weakened by incivility, victimization, and/or addiction, the ideas within her book may help you strengthen your community. Or if you are a person, who has minimal contact with other people, her ideas may provide you with a reason to increase the quantity and quality of your interactions. Or if you are a person, who lives in a community without incivility, victimization, and addiction, the contents of her book may help you understand those of us whose social environment is not as perfect as yours. But no matter who you are, reading her book will cause you to wonder about the importance of civility and the costs of incivility.
Remember: We all need a village.
And ponder: What we do not say does hurt us, and our polite interaction with others strengthens us and our community. according to Bogorad.
T.S. Bogorad is a former senior assistant prosecutor, a former probation officer, and a former resident of Athens, Pennsylvania. She maintains her law office in Northern New Jersey, where she and her husband raised their two sons. She is an alumnus of Widener University, William Paterson University, and Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey. She is also the founder of Place for the Three Cs, which is a venture designed to strengthen our communities, to foster other-awareness, and to promote 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, charms that person by smiling, listening and responding, and uses chutzpah or dares to make others comfortable during the interaction; and
(6) to increase listening, laughter, and social comfort.
However, the purposes of this book are not to repeat rules of etiquette, to
advance methods of interpreting non-verbal communication, and to discuss the consequences of victimization, although the topics of etiquette, non-verbal communication, and types of victimization are featured in this book as are the topics of charity, mistakes, perfectionism, and creativity.
Basically the themes of this book are reflected in two sentences: what we don’t say may hurt us and our community, and our polite interaction with others strengthens us and our community.