A call to revolution?

Lately I've been sensing something that I'm not altogether comfortable about. My friends are mostly either staunch blue-suited conservatives or peaceful communers with nature... overall a pretty docile, quiet and tame bunch. But lately there's a common undercurrent in what they are saying that's a loud, bold call to action. People are unhappy and scared of what the future holds. More and more I hear (or read in an email, blog post, or facebook comment) things like "take back the government" and dismay at just how out of step our elected officials are with the constituency they are supposedly representing. There's a [sometimes] unspoken question of "how did this happen?" and an even more urgent "what are we, the few people left with any common sense at all, going to do about it?"

I'm not aware of any concrete plans to incite violence, but if I were I'm not completely sure what I'd do about it. Would I try to stop it? Would I join in? I truly don't know. I know there is a part of me that's deeply concerned with what's happening in government and industry worldwide. There's a part of me that's feeling very angry and betrayed. And there's a part of me that feels huge amounts shock and dismay at just how the awful things people do to each other have escalated. But there's another part of me that feels strangley detached from it and more like a curious observer. Is it possible to feel calm and threatened at the same time? Maybe only because it really hasn't touched me personally very much. Yet.

During our devotional this morning, someone read several long quotes from a transcript of what was spoken during Sacrament Meeting in his home ward by one of our Senior Apostles just following General Conference last November. Among other things he talked about coming hard times, a complete collapse of our financial markets, learing to do without some of the luxuries we've come to think of as necessities, sacrifice for what we believe... and that this is just a continuation of the cycle of righteousness and wickedness we see repeated over and over in the scriptures. Basically that the world has become so wicked that we have to be humbled in order to find our way back to God. Very sobering and thought-provoking...