Like its neighbors Egypt and Tunisia, Libya was also feeling the after effects of years of repressing it's citizens when they took to the streets calling for such basic things as civil and political rights, and a change from the sham democracy of Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to a true and fair democratic government.
However, unlike Egypt these calls seemed to be smaller and less widespread taking place not in any of Gaddafi's power bases but only in the port city of Benghazi and seemed far from truly threatening. Although if we are to judge the threat level by the response of the police they were extremely dangerous suicidal terrorists.
What this means for america is unclear as recently we appeared to be progressing towards a better relationship with Libya as it abandoned it's nuclear and chemical weapons programs and had even paid restitution to the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. However, when all is said and done I think the U.S. government would prefer to have as many stable governments in the region as possible and our history of saying "lets spread democracy" or even attempting to aid the development of democratic governments has never really been aimed at widespread regional change usually we aimed at aiding specific states even if they were sometimes a little large.