The First Amendment helps community newspapers keep the window on the world wide open

This is Nebraska Community Newspaper Week — a week honoring local community newspapers and the role local journalists play in their communities.

I went back through old columns I’d written (it didn’t take long), and decided this might ba a good time to reprise a column written with respect to the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Your local newspaper is your window on the world, and the First Amendment helps us to keep that window open.

We attend and report on city council meetings and county commission meetings, and tell about the school board activities and how each and everyone of them spends your tax dollars, and molds the future of our children and our communities.

Those stories help us to understand the importance of the work done by state senators in the Unicameral, and our representatives to the U.S. Congress and Senate, and the complexities of the laws they are forming in our names.

Especially on a local level, there are watchdog committees set up to keep an eye on how tax dollars are spent, to make sure they are being spent in the manner in which they were designed.

That’s one of the most important functions of your local newspaper, to be a watchdog for you about the concerns of your local governments. The wedge, if you will, that holds the window open on the world.

The First Amendment guarantees your right to have access to all of that information. When I served as president of the Nebraska Press Association in 2017, I was also privileged to serve on the board of directors of Media of Nebraska, best known as a legislative watchdog, to make sure there is transparency in government and the laws it contemplates and passes.

The public’s lack of knowledge of the First Amendment was being discussed at a meeting, and many of us sadly shook our heads, lamenting the situation.

Finally someone said, “Let’s do something about it!”

Our mission was simple, we wanted to make the public aware of the rights highlighted in the First Amendment — rights we unconsciously use every day.

Most people are very familiar with the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution. It’s the one that guarantees our right to bear arms.

And, even a fifth grader will try to plead the fifth, the right to protect yourself from self-incrimination.

Then, there’s the 18th amendment, which outlawed drinking and the 21st amendment that repealed the 18th Amendment and brought back legalized drinking.

The 26th Amendment, familiar to most of my generation, approved during the Vietnam War era, that lowered the voting age to 18. The argument being, if you were old enough to fight and die for our country, you were certainly old enough to vote for whomever was declaring the war.

And, let’s not forget the 19th Amendment, not adopted until 1920, that gave women the right to vote — a right I have been practicing religiously since I turned 18.

I then applied the tenets of the First Amendment to my own life.

Freedom to practice my own religion and to respect someone else’s: When my mother was introduced decades ago to one of my dad’s relatives, he pretended not to see her; she didn’t exist. She was Catholic and he, a German Lutheran minister. Not an excuse, just an explanation.

Freedom of speech and the press: Well, that’s pretty much a given, I’m doing that right now.

The right to peaceably assemble: A sunshiny day, watching the flags blow in the wind during the dedication of the new Hartington Veterans Memorial comes to mind; or the Life Chain practiced by Catholic parishes across the state and country.

The right to petition the government: I often attend City Council meetings and have been known to express an opinion or two.

The First Amendment is the wedge that holds my window on the world wide open to the free flow of ideas — ideas I can embrace or discard based on my access to the information provided by my local newspaper, a reliable, local source of objective information.

Your local community newspaper helps to keep the window on the world open.

That’s a heck of a big responsiblity, and we take it very seriously.