How it felt to not know Trump won the election for 2 whole weeks
Joe Chandler's "bubble of ignorance" popped last week and there's no going back.
The 65-year-old calendar artist from coastal Georgia managed to stay in the dark about the election results for two full weeks. After a deluge of publicity about the "last man in America to know who won the election," the country's next president was revealed to him last week at a political take on a "gender reveal party" on an Atlanta radio show.
"I was crestfallen," Chandler said to Mashable. "It was like stab in the heart with a knife when those red balloons came out of the box."
Chandler said he had "great disdain for both candidates" but he was hoping Hillary Clinton would win since he's embarrassed by Donald Trump and worried about his proposed policies.
Now after a week of knowing who won the election, Chandler spoke to Mashable about his two weeks of ignorance and how he's adjusting to the news.
He says it wasn't a publicity stunt (if it were he says he would have used his pen name to promote his calendars and other work), it just happened organically when he decided to stay at home instead of attending a watch party on election night. Then it turned into a full day of no TV or social media and he kept it going.
But it wasn't so easy to stay uninformed.
His ex-wife (they are still friends) and adult daughter helped shield him from information and he acknowledges he was an imposition on his friends and community, who had to be careful not to reveal anything.
"There was the constant work and difficulty of trying to not know," such as walking through his small town's downtown with headphones and a sign, he said. "No one accosted me with information," which happily surprised him given how easily someone could have held up a news story.
During his media blackout he said he found a "place of solace and quietude" and that he enjoyed the not knowing. He said he felt something like a virgin or Adam, naked and exposed in the Garden of Eden, because "everyone else had been tainted with the knowledge."
He doesn't feel bad that he hid from reality for a few weeks.
"I wasn’t shirking any responsibility," he said. "I was simply walking away from it all and recharging my batteries."
He's only had a week compared to the rest of the world's three to react to the reality of a Trump presidency. He's not keen to fully pop his bubble. "I didn’t want to delve back into the misery," he said. So he's turning a blind-eye as much as he can, but tidbits of information seep in through in social interactions and through his Facebook.
More puzzling for Chandler is the fascination with what he dubbed his bubble of ignorance during an information-obsessed age: "I’m just some guy who didn’t watch TV for a while."
Topics Elections
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
