A Rock, a Lockdown, and a World I Don’t Want My Kids to Inherit

 


Author’s Note

Most of the time when I sit down to write, it’s stories from the body shop, family life, road trips with Jamie, or memories from upstate New York. This post is different. It’s political, it’s heavy, and it’s personal. But it’s also a part of my life, and pretending it didn’t happen—or that it doesn’t matter—wouldn’t feel honest. What follows isn’t about taking sides. It’s about telling the story as I experienced it, and about what I think it says about the world my kids and yours are inheriting.

The World We Live In

Yesterday, my daughter Alida’s college, UNC Wilmington, went into lockdown for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.

The first lockdown was for a bomb scare. The second was because of reports of an active shooter.

Both turned out to be false alarms. But the chain of events, the way rumors snowballed online, and the political heat that flared up around it all… it tells us a lot about where we are as a country right now. And to be honest, I don’t like it.

It started with a rock



UNCW has a tradition that revolves around a big rock on campus. Students can paint it with whatever message they want. Birthdays. Club promotions. Political slogans. Memes. It’s free expression in the most literal, washable sense — you paint it, and within 24 hours someone else can paint over it.

After a Charlie Kirk event, someone painted a memorial on the rock. I don’t think it was ever meant to stand forever, just a marker in the moment. But soon after, other students painted over it, as students always do. There was some paint thrown and no one was happy. I think it was handled in poor taste, but Everyone has a right to their own thoughts, That should have been the end of it.

Instead, it blew up.

Videos circulated of the rock being painted over. Outrage followed. People online demanded that the girl who painted it be expelled. Alumni were told not to donate a dime. Calls to fire administrators rang out because their statements weren’t “strong enough.” A campus ritual of repainting a rock turned into national news, wrapped up in America’s endless culture war.

And that set the stage for what came next.

A dormant Twitter account wakes up

Not long after the rock fight, an old Twitter account that hadn’t posted in years suddenly came back to life. The account claimed militias were coming to campus. That they had the names of everyone involved. That violence was imminent.

Then came a bomb threat on Wednesday night. Police cleared the campus. Nothing was found. The all-clear came around 1 a.m. Thursday.

Most people probably hoped that was the end of it.

But Thursday evening, around 7 p.m., another report hit: someone had seen a man with a rifle in a parking garage. A short, four-second video started circulating online. The caption read, “oh hell no, get out.”

And just like that, the campus went back into lockdown.

The response — and the silence

I’ll give credit where it’s due: law enforcement was on this immediately. From what I could tell, just about every officer within thirty miles was on campus within minutes.

But the school’s communication? That was another story.

It took about thirty minutes from the initial reports before UNCW sent its first alert about the lockdown. Thirty minutes is a lifetime when you’re sitting in a dorm or a classroom, scared, or when you’re a parent with a kid on campus and your phone is blowing up with half-baked rumors.

They eventually sent three messages over four hours:

  • The first said the school was on lockdown due to reports of an active shooter.

  • The second said the all-clear was given; it had been a false alarm.

  • The third tried to clarify that the reports themselves were false.

In between those updates, students and parents were left to piece together their own picture. And that’s when the rumor mill kicked into overdrive.

Rumors multiply

At first it was one gunman. Then two. Then three. By the time the night was over, some threads had four or five shooters roaming the campus. There were reports of shots fired. Screenshots of “arrests.”

A still frame started going around showing someone allegedly being taken down in a cafeteria. A thirty-second video surfaced showing police rushing into the same building. But if you looked closely, students were still sitting there eating. Nobody scattered. Hardly anyone even picked up a phone to film it.

That didn’t sit right with me.

I know today’s college kids. I know they’ve all got phones capable of 4K video. If there had really been an armed suspect tackled in a cafeteria, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram would have been flooded instantly. Instead, we had one still image and one vague video.

The same with that parking garage clip. Four seconds of grainy video, no audio, shot from a car rolling up behind a man carrying what looked like a rifle. The clip ends abruptly. No one saying, “Oh my God, guys, did you see that?” No one turning the corner to keep filming.

And I thought to myself: if I was in that situation, would I really just drive up calmly behind an armed man without panicking, and then stop recording after four seconds?

The more I looked at it, the less it added up.

The political spin machine

While all this was happening, the internet did what it always does: picked sides.

Some people declared this was “the right wing” getting revenge for the rock. Others said “only leftists bring guns on campuses.”

Meanwhile, kids were sitting in locked classrooms, parents were frantically texting, and officers were combing parking garages and stairwells.

I shouldn’t be shocked anymore, but it still makes my stomach turn.

A father’s perspective

I’m Nate. I’m a white man. I’m an insurance adjuster. I’m a libertarian. I’m a New Yorker who’s made North Carolina home. I could list a whole page of labels if I wanted to.

But none of them matter as much as this: I’m a father. A stepfather. Soon, a grandfather.

That’s the identity that eclipses all the rest.

I worry about these kids like 99% of parents do. I don’t want them to inherit a world where a painted rock turns into bomb threats and lockdowns, where every rumor becomes gospel online, where politics hijacks every crisis before the facts even come out.

My takeaways

So here’s what I took from this whole mess:

  • Be observant and cautious. No one will ever fault you for being safe.

  • Let situations play out before you choose sides. The politics can wait until after the facts are known.

  • Think critically about what you see online. Does the behavior in the video match what you’d expect in real life?

  • Don’t re-share unproven rumors. Fear spreads fast, and every repost amplifies it.

  • Institutions must do better. Universities don’t need to give a play-by-play, but they can give frequent, simple updates that squash rumors and calm nerves.

UNCW is a great school. It’s got a beautiful campus. It has the tools to do better in the future. I hope they use them.

Turning down the heat

To anyone still reading this: be a parent first. Be an aunt, an uncle, a neighbor, a coach, the guy at the barbecue who makes the best ribs. Be that person before you’re a political warrior.

Because history shows us that when rhetoric keeps heating up, when every crisis becomes a chance to “own” the other side, we all end up in places we don’t want to go.

I’m going to keep speaking my mind — that’s who I am. But I also know that if we don’t all turn down the temperature a little, the world my kids and grandkids inherit won’t be one any of us will enjoy living in.

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