Joe Chandler may have just been the last man in the U.S. to find out who won the American presidential election. His “bubble of ignorance” was burst Tuesday morning.
Exhausted by the long election, Chandler, an artist and writer from just outside Savannah, Georgia, decided to go to bed before the results rolled in during the wee hours of Nov. 9.
“I just didn’t have it in me,” Chandler told NBC affiliate WXIA. “I’m like, ‘I’ve got to step off this insane merry go round. I just don’t want to know. I’ll look in the morning.’”
The next day he decided to just stay home and work.
READ MORE: Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead increases to 1.7M over Donald Trump
“All I wanted to do was give myself 24 hours of blissful ignorance,” he told the Today Show over the weekend.
As one day grew into another and another, he realized his “bubble of ignorance” was “very pleasant.”
He even fashioned a sign to wear around his neck, which read: “I don’t know who won and don’t want to. Please don’t tell me!”
“I don’t venture out very often and when I do I wear my headphones and my sign and people have been very respectful of my decision,” he said.
Although he wanted to stay out-of-the-loop until 2020, he knew it was unrealistic. He accepted an offer from a local radio station to have a “gender-reveal” party live on air on Tuesday morning.
READ MORE: Alec Baldwin’s Donald Trump starts to feel pressure of presidency in ‘SNL’ cold open
After nearly two weeks under a political cone of silence, Chandler learned Donald Trump had become president-elect on The Bert Show.
“I’m distressed not so much that Trump is in office – I am distressed about that – but I’m distressed at how could America make this decision? And I think the rest of the world is distressed about it too.”
A Bernie Sanders supporter, Chandler joked he would continue to avoid the news for some time, but noted that his bubble of ignorance helped give him perspective.
“Something really changed for me in that bubble,” he said. “Not having a side, knowing that people were arguing, bickering and rioting but not knowing which side I was on it caused me to look at not so much at the politics but at the people. Who has done this to us? Is it Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton? I think we have done this to ourselves. The way I see it we’re all living in bubbles we’ve built around ourselves and that’s the crux of the problem.”
Comments