Well, he wants everybody to be kind. And to that end Kozak, who is Jewish and lives in Skokie, is proposing the idea of a National Kindness Day. He has written to President George W. Bush with the idea and is talking it up with many others, including the mayor of Skokie, who was receptive, he says.
It all came about when Kozak, a salesman by profession but a writer and public speaker at heart, was recruited last November to give a lecture to a group of adult learners enrolled in an advanced English language class at the Lake View Learning Center, a Truman College satellite school.
Kozak has a journalism degree from the University of Illinois, is a published poet and the co-author of "The Coach and Us: The True Story of the Birth of Holistic Basketball," a book about legendary DePaul University basketball coach Ray Meyer.
For the lecture, he decided to take kindness as his subject and presented the students, who came from countries all over the world, with some thoughts on the subject drawn from authors and leaders as diverse as the Dalai Lama and Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Nothing feels so good as when you do something to make someone else feel good," he told them.
He described several small acts of kindness he had performed and asked them to the same. They responded enthusiastically, Kozak says.
His emphasis on kindness, he says, grew out of his Jewish values. "Jews are always told to do a lot of mitzvot, and this would go along with that." His goal, he says, is for people "to perform more mitzvot."
After the talk, Kozak posted his ideas on kindness on his Web site (www.normankozak.com) and on SkokieTalk, a site devoted to residents of the suburb. He received enthusiastic comments in both places.
"Then I found out that there was no such thing as a Kindness Day, although there is an Apple Pie Day. But why not? Nobody is against" kindness, he says. So began his campaign.
A National Kindness Day, Kozak believes, could remind people "to go beyond the call of duty, for instance, paying somebody's check at McDonald's, helping someone cross the street - things people should already be doing, saying thank you, you're welcome."
The more people perform these acts, Kozak says, the more reinforcement they would receive to keep on being kind. "It might prevail through their total personality, with the world going up in acts of kindness and down in doing evil," he says. "It would bring about more connectedness to G-d and to people's neighbors, more camaraderie, love, kindness. There isn't as much as there could be."
Kozak continues to talk to movers and shakers about his idea while setting his goals high. A National Kindness Day, he believes, "could bring about a profound change in the world."
