Those "Uncomfortable" People

By G. E. Shuman


Have you ever known one of those people whom you just don’t feel completely comfortable being around?  That person is not one of the type you would actually cross the street to avoid running into because of some rude thing they were likely to say.  I have known a few of THAT type.  I had an uncle who was one.  He was a good man, just rude.  Yes, somehow, I have learned, you can be both.  When I was a child my whole family would cringe and do anything possible to hide or go away whenever my uncle’s car would pull into our driveway.  It was almost as bad as the duck-and-cover routine to avoid nuclear fallout that we learned in grammar school back then, and the situation was exactly as futile.  In both cases, you just can’t get away.  Like I said, my uncle was a good man; a minister and everything.  He was just rude, and unavoidable.  The way people like that operate, and get their way, is that most decent people would rather not ruin their own day with some big verbal confrontation. Therefore, my uncle always seemed to get his way.  As an associated side-note, I will tell you that a company I once worked for actually encouraged their upper management to read a terrible book entitled: “Winning Through Intimidation.”   The premise of the book was to make people who worked for you scared to death of the sight of you, and that doing so would make them work harder.  I never read the book.  I never wanted to.  I already knew my uncle, and he probably wrote it.
The type of person I’m referring to as making one simply uncomfortable is much less harsh a type than my uncle was.  This person is one who says slightly cutting things that are just not necessary to be said.  He is one who would have never heard his mother tell him: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.“  He would have been far too busy pulling the wings off from a housefly to listen to that.  You know the type, and I‘ll wager you have a mental image of an individual, in your mind, right now.  I have several.  I used to think that a person like that was just trying to be funny, in saying some stupid and, coincidentally, hurtful thing.  Come to find out, in most cases, there is no coincidence about it at all, no matter how much ‘stupid‘ is involved. To be fair, there are some legitimately stupid people, and those are okay to say whatever they want.   Doing or saying something because you can’t help it is always okay, in my book.  I would rather put up with a thousand stupid comments made by legitimately stupid people, (I have several liberal friends.) than with one stupid comment made by a smart person.   You see, smart people do it on purpose, and that, to me, is inexcusable.
I’m writing about all this today because, over the years, I have been verbally accosted, although accosted is too strong a word, by a handful of  people whom I believe to be smart, but who seem to like to say ’uncomfortable’ and unnecessary things, and thought you might have had similar experiences. Those unnecessary things, unfortunately, always seem to be etched deepest in the memory.  They are particularly difficult to erase.  I do take heart in the fact that there is justice, in the next life for sure, and in this one, for some.  Such people as we have here discussed soon exhaust an ever-diminishing list of friends, who may not actually cross the street to avoid them, but who also would not cross the street to bid them “Good day.”  
If you know someone like this, who says ’uncomfortable’ things to you, figure out if they are smart people, or stupid.  If stupid, then chalk it up to that, give them a big hug, and move on.  I they are smart, move on still, only a bit faster.
I have learned that many people go through life completely unimpaired by the rare speech impediments known as tact and manners.  If you are one of those people, stop it.