Chain Letters

One of my biggest pet peeves are chain letters, whether they come through snail mail, e-mail, web community messages, or even text messages on cell phones.

Why?

The THREATS.

I don’t appreciate it when some totally random stranger, often no one have I ever met, just a friend of a friend of a friend (if that), tells me my love life will stink, my life will be in danger, I’ll lose all my friends, my worst fears will come true, I’ll have bad luck for such-n-such long of a time, I’ll go to hell, I’ll lose my job, or any other such nonsense if I don’t “pass it on” to such-n-such amount of people within a certain amount of time.

These “letters” possess no intelligence, no integrity, and certainly no humor. “You MUST do this and this and this, and if you do you’ll be rewarded beyond you’re wildest dreams within a set time period, but IF YOU DON’T, well, you’d just BETTER WATCH OUT.”

They’re annoying, offensive, repetitive, and I wish there was something that could be done.

I will admit that there are some chain letters that aren’t offensive; these I just classify as “forwards”. I often get annoyed at these too, for other reasons, but they contain no threats. For example, these tend to tell, for example, a sad story that really happened (all facts unverified, of course,) and how we should help, and pass the word on, so more people are aware of this. (I have a friend who used to send me these all the time.)

But there’s another kind of forward, the ones that actually have positive intent (or so I assume), that I also find, at best, vaguely annoying, and, at worst, flat out offensive. These are usually religious in nature and say things like “If you love God you’ll send this to ten people in fifteen minutes! And if you don’t…(insert badly concealed insult of choice here.)” Thanks all the same, but I can love God without passing on yet another annoying time wasting, threat giving junk email.

I guess other people enjoy them. Obviously—or there wouldn’t be so many of them. And it’s not that I mind all forwarded messages—some are fun pass along games (note the absence of threats, pass-it-on obligations, and stupidity in them). But threats are over the top. Especially when it's written badly, like a small child wrote it, where the lack of thought or intelligence put into it is completely obvious.

So the next time you get a chain letter, or are about to pass one on, just think about this: if someone came up and said those same threats to you in person, you probably wouldn’t be very happy. Writing it down and giving it to people gets the same message across. It would be nice if we could all be a little more courteous to each other, stop wasting our time, and stop pretending a silly letter has the power to make good or bad “luck” come or go.

Or, at the very least? Avoid sending those chain letters to those you know don’t like them. It’s just a small courtesy you can pay to someone who doesn’t like being threatened for not participating the fad.

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