President Hinckley, it turns out, has always been incredible.

Added it up this morning, and I've spent about $180 on music since I've been home. How about that. Which means I've spent about ten minutes every workday paying for CDs. Putting it that way, it doesn't sound that bad at all... and in fairness, I've been replacing my decimated CD collection (a casualty of leaving it with my family for two years) and catching up on stuff I missed. And furthermore, it's my only expense apart from burnt offerings to the petroleum gods, so I feel pretty satisfied with my fiscal responsibility. So I don't want to hear it.

The other day I listened to a talk that President Hinckley delivered at BYU, back when he was a young apostle and the Vietnam War was still only six years in, with six more to go. It was a telling artifact; I, like most people my age, haven't heard much about that conflict except the shameless punditry we read in the history books... the predictable lamentations, 'if only they had known what we know'. But here was a brilliant, deeply compassionate, inspired man, speaking on the subject without the benefit (or maybe the prejudice) of hindsight.

He spoke on the conflict in exactly the way I can imagine him speaking on ours... refusing to pass judgment, just reminding his audience of the horror of war, and the humanity and brotherhood of all the involved parties--including the enemy, and the arguably-culpable politicians. He watched President Nixon speaking before a firing squad of cameras and microphones, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and said he felt a sudden compassion for the man so terribly accountable for so much. No appraisal of the man's leadership or decisionmaking, or useless speculation as to whether he "deserves what he gets". Just sympathy for a human being in a really difficult position. And how terribly ironic that the mess was made by Kennedy (whose teflon-coated 'legacy' has yet to wear through), while Nixon--the one who actually got us out of there--is one of the most famously despised presidents in our history.

Politics can be so dehumanizing, but the next time I see President Bush, I'm going to see flesh and blood. A child of God deserving of compassion, even if I think he's ridiculous. Or maybe especially if I think he's ridiculous. There's my brother on live television, and he's doing a really hard job, and the whole world hates him for screwing it up. And maybe he's not a good person... maybe he's an incompetent, greedy, selfish crook. So much more reason to feel sorry for him.

But the most interesting thing about the talk was his description of the ambiguous feelings of the people for the war:

"I have spoken quietly in private conversation, never publicly, some rather trenchant criticism about some of the things I have observed. I have been in situations where I have tried to comfort those who mourned over the loss of choice sons. I have wept as I have turned away from the beds of those who have been maimed for life. I think I have felt very keenly the feelings of many of our young men concerning this terrible conflict in which we are engaged, but I am sure we are there because of a great humanitarian spirit in the hearts of the people of this nation. We are there in a spirit of being our brother’s keeper. I am confident that we have been motivated by considerations of that kind, and, regardless of our attitude on the conduct of the war, of our feelings concerning the diplomacy of our nation, we have to live with our conscience concerning those whose freedom we have fought to preserve. We are there, and we find ourselves in a very lonely position as leaders in the world, criticized abroad as well as at home."

I've always resisted the comparison of our war to Vietnam, but there it is. All the moral uncertainty, the struggle of conscience, the terrible feeling of responsibility and loneliness. And here we are, the media and the government and the public playing the exact same roles as if from a teleprompter, and all of us making the exact same mistakes. It was so enlightening to see a view of that conflict that allowed for the possibility that intelligent, informed, compassionate people could have supported it (even as their misgivings grew about the way it was conducted).

It's ironic... because our culture tends to assume that we are intrinsically wiser and better-informed than all previous generations, we feel little obligation to learn anything but the most obvious lessons from our history... so when our present turns out to be a lot more complicated than those silly, elementary problems that our grandparents faced, we find ourselves totally unprepared--and we end up doing all the same dumb stuff.

It's a great gap in our study of history (at least in every class I took). We learn the facts, the events, the consequences... but I suspect it's at least as important to understand how the people in our history books felt about the history they were making; to have at least some degree of empathy for them, if we're going to learn anything from them.

"And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." (Malachi 4:6)

--Kevin