Out of Arkansas - Is That A Gun in your pocket?

Cultural sensitivity has been given a bad rap. Only sen-si-tive types believe in cultural sensitivity, right? Regular folks naturally know how to act. Ironically, acting natural is the worst state of social agitation. If our evolutionary voyage to cultural sensitivity was plotted, the course would oscillate like ocean swells in a perfect storm.

Should you have a gut feeling that a national behavioral shipwreck is inevitable, cheer up. Historically we're cutting a true wake, if near history in Northwest Arkansas is a true compass.

About 152 years ago, 1857, ground zero for cultural insensitivity was near today's Mountainburg at a post office community, Narrows, now defunct. This 1844 community was once located beyond the pale of the milk of human kindness. In 1857, a legendary feud between two families culminated in what is locally known as Bloody Sunday.

Reportedly a missionary preacher staved off violence during the meeting, but afterward, death and severe injuries were inflicted by both families assaulting each other with whatever was handy. Women and children fought with Sunday's dinner utensils. Men used their fists, feet, teeth, rocks and large knives.

Although much can be said about their family values, like going to church and gathering together for family activities, the result of this picnic was an absence of organized religious services for the next 70 years.

During that same year, about eight miles south on today's US71, near Deans Market, Hwy. 282 runs west off of US71 toward the pretty little valley of Frog Bayou. Just down the road (.3 m. west and .3 m. north) there's a monument for Parley Parker Pratt, a Mormon Church elder and close friend of Church founder Joseph Smith.

Pratt, a married man, was traveling to Utah Territory with a woman he persuaded to join the Church and him (as his 9th plural wife). Her husband, an Arkansawyer, caught up with them and killed Pratt on the spot. The woman's story is unknown.

That same year, 1857, this murder is listed among other motives for the Mountain Meadow Massacre near Cedar City, Utah. Mormons, crudely dressed as Indians, killed 118 unarmed Arkansas men, women, and children who were crossing the area in covered wagons. A stone monument at the courthouse in Harrison, Ark., lists the dead from this locally organized wagon train.

Sociologists might lay the blame for these kinds of behavior on the playground, where we supposedly learn all we need to know about human beings. That could be. It's hard to imagine a crueler place than the playground.

Over the past 7,000 years the litmus test for cultural sensitivity has been shaded from dropping rocks on strangers to vaporizing them. While the moral difference between the two isn't meaningful, the global effect has become significant.

Now is a good time to review the rules of the playground: mind your manners; be cheerful; be useful; and don't complain.