"If you're trying to decide what to do, and you only have two choices, do the thing that's hardest," my pop used to tell me. "The right thing is always the hardest thing."

Which is how Scott Pelley got canned off "60 Minutes," a television news show that rose to journalism and stayed there for a hell of a long time.

Management canned him for doing the hard thing, which was the right thing, as it almost always is.

And "new management" at the show, people who are the usual bouquet of cost-cutting conservative turd roses, canned him like a tuna, because dissent is "disloyal" these days when we serve the old American virtues only symbolically. The flag, we like very much. Freedom, we do not like so much. The flag is easy. Freedom is hard. The Pledge of Allegiance is for children. Freedom is for adults.

The people who fired Pelley came in on the high end of what I'm sure they think is journalism — that is to say, The New York Times and Vanity Fair. What both of them needed was a couple hard years covering murders in the projects, small town city councils and the "two dead at intersection" story.

I've written editorials, and I've written newspaper columns. I've also watched them put the dead guy in the ambulance.

Pelley broke in on a television station in Lubbock, Texas, small time as hell, and exactly where you ought to be at the beginning. That's the place where you learn that the story is more important than you. That's where you learn to spend three hours at a school committee meeting during which they discuss the financial feasibility of new bleachers for the football stadium.

And I'm no virgin. As a newspaper reporter, I had a boss who was in a relationship with an elected official. Another boss was married and dating a woman who worked in the mayor's office. After retirement, I did a couple years of talk radio as a low-wage adventure. The station's general manager said her favorite host was one of the afternoon guys.

"He'll say anything I tell him to say," she told me.

As reporter, you try to slide around that stuff. You try to ignore what's wrong. You got rent to pay. Your kids like milk on their cereal.

And you keep the job, sometimes for years.

Or you don't.

Because sooner or later the school committee comes back to haunt you, and the election nights, and the courtrooms, and the quiet accumulation of facts.

And maybe you pop one day. You go off like a roman candle, and you say the truth the way you would have written it in your notebook, back there at the school committee meeting, when your shirt and your haircut were both cheap-looking.

And you write the fiery email. You interrupt the ideological drool of the daily or weekly meeting with some ugly, scaly truth that slithered off a night shift.

Of course, they fire you. You're disloyal. If they don't fire you, they hate all your story ideas for the next six months, or they pick your stories to pieces word by word.

To a great extent, journalism is the art of despair, disbelief and disrespect. It is not the art of loyalty, belief and happiness that you have a reporter's job, and can think of other people as zoo animals in baseball caps.

I'm semiretired now, and in my 37 years in news, I wasn't one-tenth as successful as Scott Pelley, and I never met him because my haircuts are still cheap, cheaper since I retired.

But I did the same thing he did, and I think I did a lot of it in the same way.

And I went off like a roman candle here and there, and I paid for it, and, as time went on, the price got higher and higher.

All I really have to say to Scott Pelley, brother of mine, is that if he wants, I'll buy him a beer after the school committee meeting.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.

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