When I was at NCSSM, I took Spanish and History from a rather…interesting…instructor. He had a bit of a reputation as a rabble-rouser, black supremacist, and harsh critic of the United States, and after going through two classes with him, I can confirm that the reputation was not undeserved.

I rarely agreed with him. I still don’t. But I highly value the experience because I had never before been exposed to “the other side” from “the other side” themselves. It wasn’t always easy to hear some of the things they said, and being one of two white students in a class of forty was a really eye-opening experience. But no one ever said true learning should be easy. Going through that experience has given me a considerable amount of compassion and understanding simply because I have heard the logic of arguments (and yes, there is logic there) that are completely contrary to the accepted status quo — the one that neither Democrats nor Republicans nor Libertarians nor Greens nor most everyone else doesn’t question and doesn’t argue about. Many of them, in fact, don’t even realize these particular points of view exist.

One of the issues to which I was exposed was the “wrong” side of what was then the raging civil war in El Salvador. The right-wing and United States-backed military government was in a breathtakingly vicious conflict with a leftist and borderline communist guerrilla movement called the National Liberation Front, referred to by the initials of its official (Spanish) name, FMLN. I don’t judge which was “right” and which was “wrong”: I focus on the fact that the vast majority of casualties and fatalities were civilians. It was one of the most moving things I ever encountered and to this day it is one of the reasons that I am disgusted with the idea that my tax dollars go to support things like the School of the Americas or whatever it is they’re calling it these days.

This evening I saw another documentary about El Salvador that was more up-to-date. The civil war ended shortly after I graduated from high school, and in El Salvador has held U.N. monitored free elections every five years since 1994. So what happened to the FMLN?

It became a political party. Today it is the second most powerful party in El Salvador and the majority rule has passed back and forth between the FMLN and ARENA (with roots in the original rightist government) in a manner strikingly similar to Democrats and Republicans in the United States. The minority party — whether ARENA or FMLN — has always had a strong presence when they did not hold the majority.

It’s going to take years for El Salvador to recover from the war, but learning about the fate of the FMLN tonight gave me a lot of hope about the future of democracy in this world. It also is a symbol of hope that all the wars going on can, indeed, end in a good peace instead of an oppressive one. At the end of the video — which was mostly about the 1989 murder of the six Jesuit priests — someone asked me why I was smiling after a video about murder. I told them why and they smiled too.

Unfortunately, there was one very problematic footnote. During the civil war the United States gave $60 billion of military aid, instruction and support to the Salvadoran government. Since the end of the war the United States has given $500 million of humanitarian aid to the Salvadoran government.