Novel Excerpt 3 -- Deconstruction

I've finished the first draft of chapter 3 of a novel I'm playing with, Deconstruction. I'm posting most of it for patrons on Patreon as a motivation for me to keep writing. Be interesting to see if I keep going. It's not easy to synthesize the reasons so many are deconstructing right now in a narrative form that conveys the swirl of thoughts and feelings involved. Here's the previous excerpt.

Here's the excerpt for today:

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Chapter 3
The fall of 2016 was the beginning of a strange time. I didn’t realize it so much until I started looking back. They say that a frog won’t jump out of a boiling kettle if you turn the heat up slowly. It doesn’t notice smaller changes in temperature if you heat it up gradually. And then it dies. Mind you, I’ve never tested the theory.

Everyone at Ebenezer had to take a “Freshman Seminar” about adjusting to college, developing time management skills, budgeting your money, etc. We were required to keep a journal and submit at least one entry a week.

(I heard stories of earlier years when students fabricated a whole semester’s worth of journal entries the last week of class, but those days were gone. We had to submit them electronically now every week.)

For some reason, I didn’t stop journaling at the end of the semester. I didn’t really participate in the daily lunch and supper debates between Matt, Brad, and April. I was a quiet sort. Sometimes I wondered if they even knew I was there.

But I was there. I was paying closer attention to the conversations than they probably were. I started writing them down in my journal. As graduation approached four years later, I went back and read them from start to finish. It was amazing the amount of ground we covered, a virtual encyclopedia of topics.

But what most stood out to me was how we all boiled in the kettle. Matt went from being a somewhat reluctant Trump supporter almost to worshiping him. Brad went from holding his nose for Trump to the brink of socialism with Bernie in 2020.

April remained a moderate Democrat the whole time. From my notes, her positions hardly changed at all during those four years. But Matt could have sworn that she had become a flaming liberal at Ebenezer.

Like a frog in the kettle, we sometimes don’t perceive these changes. But reading my journal entries, they were plain as day.