American Conscience

This column was published April 3, 2025 in the Manhattan Mercury.

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As a local news broadcast journalist in the 1980s, I tended to devour network news, not only to stay current on world goings-on, but to see how the big boys and girls plied my chosen trade. When images of Ronald Reagan flickered on my Sony Trinitron, I would tell my 3-year old son, “That’s the president of the United States. He lives in the White House.”    

That was followed by informal lessons over chopped up hotdogs mixed with mac and cheese and chocolate pudding in little pop-top cans on the role and function of government, separation of powers, manifest destiny, and more broadly, the rights and freedoms that we, as Americans, enjoy.

One day, a few civics lessons and small screen Great Communicator sightings deep, my son looked at me earnestly, and asked, “What color is Tom Brokaw’s house?”

More parenting lay ahead, or at least more effective parenting, to help him discern the difference between newsmaker and news deliverer.  

Fast forward to last weekend. Now a credit card-carrying adult, my son has a family, career, mortgage and an American conscience. He, his wife and two little boys, ages 6 and 3, were planning to participate in a freedom march in Kansas City and would I like to accompany them?

Why yes I would, thank you very much.

If I don’t like what my government is doing, I can whine about it, post a screed on social media, wring my hands and/or gnash my teeth. I can reach out to my elected members of Congress. When none of those work, I can exercise the rights granted me as an American, take to the streets with my son and his family and protest.   

c. Kansas City Star

We joined hundreds of our closest American conscience-sharing friends and took to the sidewalks of downtown Kansas City, to exhibit some of the freedoms that those who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, sought to create and protect.

“Show-me-what-democracy-looks-like.”

“This-is-what-democracy-looks-like.”

It was not my first rodeo. At the tender age of 10, I got a close up look at the First Amendment when my family spent the summer of 1968 in Berkeley, California. Surrounded by hippies and counterculture, the wide-eyed Kansas kid walked smack into a knot of freedoms: expression, speech and assembly. On my way to get a pack of baseball cards, I weaved my way through American consciences to get to the Park ‘n Shop on the far side of Telegraph Avenue.

A thousand people in the street, singing songs, carrying signs, chanting in rhythm.

“Hey-hey-L-B-J. How-many-kids-did-you-kill-today?”

My parents made sure I understood what I was witnessing. I had watched Walter Cronkite with my father enough times to learn that “guerilla warfare” was not, in fact, M-16 toting hominids, but a Communist tactic to kill the young men whose lives the Berkeley protesters sought to save.   

Like their father before them, my grandsons are too young to grasp the full intent of what it means to march for democracy. The youngest is the same age as his father when he pondered the color of Brokaw’s house.

I wonder, when he has his own family and mortgage, if he’ll reflect on this early experience and realize the lessons his father sought to impart. I wonder, if he’ll connect the dots between his father’s curiosity about the color of Tom Brokaw’s house, his grandfather’s Berkeley summer and his own rights, duties and expectations as an American.     

It strikes me as the forming of an American conscience. 

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ weekdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN. Follow his writings at mikematson.com