I am not inclined to ranting, but I have to get something off my chest. I am tired of being bullied in chain emails and on social network platforms like Facebook by well-meaning people who usually express a supportive idea like "Tell your mother you love her", "People with autism are people too", etc. BUT then they tell me that if I don't repost the message or forward the email to 10 friends in the next 24 hours I am a bad person. Here is an example:

Anti-bullying poster uses bullying techniques!

How ironic that the anti-bullying poster I saw on Facebook is using coercion, a bullying technique. "Repost or you are heartless!"

Bullying is the use of force or coercion to abuse or intimidate others. One of its most insidious forms is emotional blackmail: "If you love me you will ....", "If you support the soldiers, you'll fight a budget decrease for defense", etc.

I am all for people expressing their values and beliefs on social media platforms. But I wish to decide of my own free will whether I want to support their cause or not and if I want to do it overtly as they have just done.

I am increasingly aware of how many people feel they have the right to tell me how to think and act. Wouldn't it be far more useful if they tell me whatthey think and why, so I can make up my own mind without risking that I will be judged wanting every time my views differ from another's.

I would like to share with you the opening of a wonderful book on personality by Dr. David Keirsey entitled Please Understand Me II:

If I do not want what you want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong.
Or if I believe other than you, at least pause before you correct my view.
Or if my emotion is less than yours, or more, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel more strongly or weakly.
Or yet if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, let me be.

I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up changing me into a copy of you.

I may be your spouse, your parent, your offspring, your friend, or your colleague.

If you will allow me any of my own wants, or emotions, or beliefs, or actions, then you open yourself, so that some day these ways of mine might not seem so wrong, and might finally appear to you as right -- for me.

To put up with me is the first step to understanding me. Not that you embrace my ways as right for you, but that you are no longer irritated or disappointed with me for my seeming waywardness.

And in understanding me you might come to prize my differences from you, and, far from seeking to change me, preserve and even nurture those differences.

I vote for nurturing others' differences instead of trying to change them.

- Herb

P.S. (added 26 October 2018): My attention was recently directed to a very informative article published online by a California-based law firm https://www.hoganinjury.com/workplace-bullying-what-does-the-law-say/ While laws are not the same everywhere, persons who feel they are being bullied will find useful information in this article. Thank you Hogan Injury for this resource.