I have more questions than ever bouncing through my hollow skull these days (which likely accounts for that ringing in my ears).
First off, I wonder in 2020 why any sane person with a love for life, a family, and a history of being human would want to become president of the United States.
I wonder about the legitimacy of holding today's generation of Americans responsible for slavery and whether that could be compared with holding young Japanese people responsible for Hiroshima, considering it was their ancestors who started World War II in the Pacific by bombing Pearl Harbor.
I wonder why the cable news channels obviously believe, by the same choice of "experts" repeatedly used for their thoughts, that only this select group from among millions of qualified and educated people with equally sound thoughts to share, are so worthy of being heard.
I wonder why so many major news organizations purposefully choose political sides today, thereby alienating as much as half of their potential audience by flaunting obvious ideological biases rather than choosing to remain objective and fair.
Relatedly, I wonder if I've been mistaken all this time to believe our First Amendment was created so our media could be free to acquire and objectively relate facts and truths, rather than embrace and purposefully spread slanted political propaganda and incomplete stories presented as purportedly honest news.
After reading the following paragraph from the CDC several times, I still wonder if I'd register positive for covid-19 if I have antibodies created by another past coronavirus infection, such as the common cold, resulting in a false positive covid reading: "A positive [antibody] test result shows you may have antibodies from an infection with the virus that causes covid-19. However, there is a chance a positive result means that you have antibodies from an infection with a virus from the same family of viruses (called coronaviruses), such as the one that causes the common cold."
I wonder, should I test negative for covid-19, what's to prevent me from contracting and passing it to others if I become exposed the next day without symptoms?
As I've asked before, why do the medical system and some major city governments overlook thousands of rioting political protesters standing shoulder-to-shoulder, many maskless, shouting hysterically in each other's faces while clamping down on many hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens who want to gather for church services, rallies and other places to interact peacefully? Are masks and social distancing considered irrelevant as long as one political ideology is being pushed, or is this simply more hypocrisy in an era obviously permeated by it?
I wonder how Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House go-to covid-19 physician and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, could possibly have known in 2017 that there was "no doubt" President Donald Trump would be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency. "The history of the last 32 years that I have been the director of the NIAID will tell the next administration that there is no doubt they will be faced with the challenges their predecessors were faced with," he said during a medical gathering at Georgetown University three years ago. By then, Trump was already in office and not guaranteed a second term. So how could Fauci have possibly known and predicted something like covid-19 would ravage our nation?
How does it serve the purposes or intents of protesters and rioters citing injustices against minorities to damage the statue of one of the Black race's heroes for justice and equality, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, or that of one of the planet's greatest champions of peaceful resistance, Mohandas Gandhi?
I wonder if the mass media will ever tell the rest of America just how many rioters and protesters likely are being funded week after week. Are many also regularly being transported from one city to another? Who is giving many of them coordinated guidance and direction? Why don't I already know those answers?
I wonder why the Black Lives Matter activists aren't constantly marching on behalf of ending the horrific carnage among Blacks in Chicago, or in support of Black law enforcement officers, or for so many urban Black residents, including children, who are being regularly killed by others of their race?
If this search for answers isn't enough to suit, valued readers, I'll throw in a few more that might also have crossed your minds: Why do we dream? What is consciousness? Why do we have it? And what are its origins?
What's the truth behind the now well-documented UFO phenomenon, considering there now are thousands of convincing videos and personal experiences being related from credible people throughout the world? I'd surely like to know before it's my time for my own consciousness to depart this world.
Now go out into the world and treat everyone you meet exactly how you want them to treat you.
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Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist, was editor of three Arkansas dailies and headed the master's journalism program at Ohio State University. Email him at [email protected].