When an emergency hits here he will be the first one at the Bishop’s door pounding on it demanding assistance. People assume that there won’t be anything bad happen in their lifetime so would rather go unprepared then to face their own reality and mortality.

Life is in the fast lane.. techology has far surpassed anything anyone could have ever imagined. You look at Joseph Smith’s days… had someone told him how fast you could get from one county to another county he would have shaken his head. Even if he did get revelation from God, there is no way even he could have understood what was coming.

There was a plethora of “prophets” at the time–Dylan being one of the foremost. Just about every upcoming recording artist at the time had something to say about changing social conditions. I think some of the “prophesying” was of the self-fullfilling kind–not to lessen the gift of foresight that some may have been blessed with. I say self-fullfilling because there was a spirit of rebellion that undergirded the whole movement. The prophetic shouts were really the expressions of a hopeful angst for the destruction of older values.

I think the change was inevitable primarily because western morality was never completely founded upon pure religion. And a moral code bereft it’s of religious roots will soon decline into an (almost) arbitrary imposition of socially acceptable “values”. The horror of such is that one doesn’t know where to run in order to find a sincere reason for adhering to such values. So (imo) there was an inevitable explosion, a busting loose from those values. The problem with that explosion is that the hopeful rebels, in their unmitigated anger, overturned everything good as well as bad from the previous generation in their search for sincerity. And to this day have not found what they were looking for because of their prejudice against the “old” which is where the pearls of sincerity are really to be found. The old just needed some (vigorous) cleaning off–not a complete annihilation.

Jack