Kindness in Naperville, aka KIN
"A grassroots community movement to promote good-natured civility."

For several years, a number of PN readers have pitched ideas to promote kindness and good manners. Several readers mentioned the "Random Acts of Kindness" campaigns as an example to emulate.

One reader recently returned from a trip to Minnesota where residents are considered “Minnesota Nice,” adhering to friendly, courteous and mild-mannered behavior. Searching online, we found Minnesota Nice was defined as “an aversion to confrontation, a tendency toward understatement, emotional restraint and a disinclination to make a fuss or stand out.”

Consider traffic behavior. When someone slows down to allow another driver to enter a lane in front of the other person, that’s “Minnesota Nice.”

Others have wondered if the fast pace of the new-age with so much to learn and communicate has been a distraction, eating up time while failing to teach the foundation of character education to our youth. Basic manners are missing.

Guess what?  It’s nothing new. Back in the 1700s when Founding Father George Washington was 14 years old, he focused on writing “101 Rules of Civility in Conversation Amongst Men,” influenced by even earlier writings from 1664.

For instance, Washington wrote, “Speak not when others speak, sit not when others stand, and walk not when others stop.”

If you search for the rules of civility online, you’ll find many rules apply to today.

Closer to home, a friend recently passed along a book published in 1921 by J.L. Nichols & Company in Naperville. (Yes, that's the book publishing company started by Naperville's library benefactor.) The work includes tips on family government, good manners and acceptable conversation. Watch for its words of advice, also considered "civility" to appear in upcoming editions of Positively Naperville.

While we were trying to come up with a slogan, we also tested some “nice” ideas in quasi focus groups.

One participant mentioned when she presented the idea of promoting “nice” to a board of directors on which she served, she practically was laughed out of the room.

Several men, almost in unison, replied, “Nice guys finish last.”

Still, we persisted in our pursuit. We came up with “Kindness in Naperville, a grassroots community movement to promote good-natured civility.”

 We’ll call it KIN for short, mindful of family.

If folks want to mock us for striving to be considerate, courteous, loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, faithful, gentle and self-controlled, so be it. Call us Pollyannas. It’s a free country. Diversity and opinions absolutely are welcome.

But as we begin 2011 with more optimism than we began last year, we find ourselves reminiscing. Our thoughts turned to a fortune cookie fortune we enjoyed long ago: Be kind whenever possible.It’s always possible.

Whatever the circumstances, everyone can resolve to be kind even in the most spirited and/or disagreeable moments. Respect goes both ways.

We consider civility to mean well-mannered, the unenforced standards of conduct which demonstrate that a person is proper and polite instead of rude.

Civility is far more than the spoken word. Civility implies practicing decent public behavior while dining out, opening doors, waiting, talking on the phone, driving, bicycling, walking, etc.

For example, when you’re walking down the sidewalk four abreast and several folks are walking toward you, move to the right, single file, to allow both groups to pass. In fact remind yourself, “This is America. Keep right.”

—Positively Naperville
January 2011