Living in North Utah County, you can't even find a local bookstore (Besides Deseret and other religious bookstores). Wal-Mart? Yes. Seminaries at the High Schools? Yes. Wendy's? Yes! Starbuck? Oh yeah, baby. I have never lived in a place where people are so content to be ignorant of worldly events. Take the recently released additional pictures from Abu Ghraib. You can't even have a discussion with your neighbor about Bush's veto of the bill to restrict interogation methods to the army field manual because, to most people here, it is a non-issue like human induced climate change. Out of sight, out of mind.
The LDS church has a phenomenal humanitarian program. However, one approach to one problem is to spend millions of dollars on wheelchairs for the millions of people throughout the world disabled by landmines and war. This is the Band-Aide approach. Could this powerful, altruistic organization instead, work to eliminate landmines and force political pressure on our own country to sign the multi-national Land Mine Ban Treaty? Encouraging people to be politically neutral harms a democracy. Religion can be an opiate distracting us from the world today.