2016: The Year I Became a Racist Sexist Bigot Homophobe, Part 5 of 11 – Dr. Jekyll and the Morning After

by Randall Nozick | Nov 21, 2017 | America, Americans, Culture, Opinion, Politics, President Trump | 0 comments

(My 2016 Presidential Election Forecast Map based on polling data adjusted for guestimated polling source bias.)

by Randall Nozick

(If you missed it, start from the beginning with Part 1 – I Dare You to Try to Understand or see the last part, How Fake News Really Affected 2016.)

Part 5 – Dr. Jekyll and the Morning After

This entire story has unfolded to this point to provide context for a single Facebook post. I wrote it on November 9, 2016, the day after the election. The world woke up after a very long election night to the realization Donald Trump would be the President of the United States of America in a couple short months. Private messages came pouring in. Some wanted to give me a virtual high-five, some said goodbye to me forever as their friend, but most wanted to know what I thought would happen next.Up to that point, I had been thinking on a broader level, as were most people. The new reality, however, was immediate and stark as people who called themselves my friends for years suddenly saw me as their mortal enemy. “Indeed, what is the way forward?” I thought.

The Facebook post was as much to answer my own question as any of theirs. The following description of how it was written, and the way it made me feel when it was done, is here to provide the final context to understanding the post itself.

It was hammered out in a single sitting in a very rare fountain of word after word. I’m usually very methodical in my writing, producing final text at an unimpressive rate of about one paragraph per hour. This time, I rolled out 2,800 words in what seemed like a few minutes, but was in just under an hour in real time.

Then I read it. It was like someone much wiser than me wrote it. I hope you get the chance to experience that feeling a few times in your life. The clash between personal modesty and pride in something that came from someplace so deep, it doesn’t seem to belong to you, is very… indescribable.

The post was shared by several friends and copied and pasted by others (with permission). It came back to mind a few days ago when one of my friends shared the Facebook Memory of it. I read it again. This time, the feeling it had been written by someone else was intensified by the year of time passed. I was, very uncomfortably, even freer to agree with myself.

This is when the strange timing of life came into play. A friend of mine pointed out an alternative media organization with an open call for writers. As I wondered how I could get these words in front of more people, the opportunity presented itself.

The parts following this one are the text of the post itself.

(Please stay tuned for the next part. It’s a long story, so I broke it down into life-sized bites.)