My First Lockdown

My son's school went into lockdown yesterday. By the time I got the call, it had already been going for thirty minutes. Best case, it takes me 22 minutes to get there. That math adds up to 52 minutes of not knowing. That number will stay with me for a long time.At 9:30 that night, my 14-year-old came out of his room and told me the full story. His teacher called her husband during the lockdown and started crying. His classmates played cards under their desks. And when he told me about it, he said: it was my first lockdown. Not a crisis. A milestone. A thing that was always going to happen eventually. We have normalized school violence so completely that our kids have accepted it as a rite of passage, while the rest of the country moves on to the next outrage cycle without a single serious conversation about why this keeps happening.From there, I get into the Kevin O'Leary data center push in Utah, the Stratos project, and the billionaire gaslighting playbook. Kevin O'Leary is not a US citizen. He holds citizenship in Canada, Ireland, and the UAE. And yet he is on television telling Americans that data centers are a matter of national security. But the argument isn't really about China. It is about extracting public resources and threatening to leave if you don't hand them over. That is not capitalism. That is a hostage negotiation.The good news: citizens in Reno, Nevada spent seven hours at a city council meeting and won a 30-day moratorium on data center construction. That is a real victory and we need to say so out loud.I also talk about driving to a political event for a Nevada gubernatorial candidate, passing through a homeless encampment on the way, and walking into a room full of people who, against enormous odds, are still choosing hope. That contrast broke something open for me.I close with something I have had to teach myself: pour support into the people around you who are fighting. Over-index on telling them you see them. We are all standing in the fire hose. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is push up through the water for the person next to you and say: we are still here.This one runs long. It was supposed to be a news day. It became something else.