Hindsight Is 2020: Tales From Tim Walz’s Minnesota During America’s Crises

I think it’s safe to say that the year 2020 left no one unscathed. No matter your background or beliefs, between the spread of Covid, the response to Covid, and the nationwide protests and riots following the death of George Floyd, it was a trying time of uncertainty, change, and anxiety for all of us. Now that Kamala Harris has selected Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as her vice president candidate, I thought it would be helpful for people to hear what life has been like in Tim Walz’s Minnesota and what life could be like if he’s in charge of setting policy for the nation. 

The Early Days of the Pandemic

As a resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota, we had several weeks of lockdown at the onset of Covid. My then-boyfriend and I were incredibly cautious – we came home early from a trip, stocked up on groceries, and quarantined our mail for at least a day before touching it. He had a pile of scraps of paper we could use to touch door handles in his apartment building, and we even felt guilty when one or both of us would go back to my apartment for the thought that we were spreading pathogens from one apartment ecosystem to another. 

All this to say, we took things very seriously while much was still unknown about the virus. I followed all the recommended and required precautions, like wearing a mask while dancing and singing to teach children music at my job (this task was especially draining without proper oxygen flow), washing my hands regularly (i.e. constantly), and only seeing friends while socially distanced and outside. During this time, Walz set up a hotline for citizens to report one another if they noticed someone breaking the lockdown mandate, much like you might expect to find in Soviet Russia. The mood that this created was one of neighbor-on-neighbor, friend-on-friend suspicion and hostility.

The George Floyd Riots

Then, as the protests and riots began in our city following the death of George Floyd just 10 or so blocks from my apartment on Chicago Avenue, I began to notice some strange contradictions in behavior. Suddenly, everyone I knew was gathering in large groups, packed close together, as if Covid was no longer an issue. The strictest among us, the most likely to use Walz’s hotline, seemed the most likely to be out with the crowd. Personally, I didn’t feel comfortable joining in – but it was due to more than the possibility of catching or spreading a virus. 

When our mayor, Jacob Frey, along with the chief of police, requested that Governor Walz send in at least 600 National Guardsmen to prevent rioters from burning down our police precinct and local businesses, Walz held off until the damage was already done, and even then only sent 100 guardsmen. The “peaceful protests” that my friends participated in during the day turned into violence and flames each night as soon as the sun went down, all while Walz’s wife kept her windows open to smell the burning rubber and Walz’s adult daughter spread classified information about the National Guard’s deployment and location to encourage the riots to continue. Kamala Harris, for her part, asked her social media followers to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to bail out protesters and rioters, many of whom went on to commit further violence. 

The atmosphere of antagonism and the permissiveness of violence that Walz, at worst, created and, at best, enabled are not things I personally would like to see from second in command in the White House. 

My friends noticed that I wasn’t joining them on the front lines and that I wasn’t posting black squares or chiming in with everyone else on social media. What I was doing instead was researching what was really going on, why the people in power were doing what they were doing, and what the organization Black Lives Matter was really up to. All of this new information put me in a tough spot. While I, like everyone else, felt sick and distraught watching the footage of Floyd’s death, I couldn’t respond to that tragedy by joining in on a trend I knew I did not agree with on any level. And now, I had to find the courage to explain that to my activist friends, whose emotional reaction was heightened by the rhetoric of everyone from celebrities on social media to our own governor.

It’s a strange thing to know that your close friends are questioning whether or not you are secretly racist. Unless you’ve been through it, I’m not sure you can imagine the feeling accurately. Due to this divisive organization’s hold on the general public’s opinion, along with Walz’s rhetoric pouring fuel on the fire, that’s exactly what was going on behind the scenes. My friends asked me to meet with them to discuss “ideologies” – to go through a round of purity tests. 

The result of these conversations was the loss of two friends and of one musical collaboration. While I do believe we all had good intentions and truly did want similar end results for society generally, because I saw the route and solutions differently than they did, they deemed me unworthy of association. At the end of the day, their ideology took on a religious role in their worldview, and what they perceived as my heresy necessitated my excommunication. Luckily, my two closest friends in this friend group ultimately stuck by my side, though I can’t say there wasn’t a time when they doubted me. 

Enter: The Vaccine

Then came the vaccines. First, you should know that I grew up in a household some might describe as “crunchy” or “granola.” My mom only uses vinegar or baking soda to clean most things, chemical odors as commonplace as nail polish were forbidden in the house (I painted my nails outside), and we ate quinoa and wheatgrass shots from our local co-op before it was trendy. We also didn’t get many vaccines as babies because of bad reactions and the subsequent in-depth research my mom had done. Instead, we used homeopathy and alternative medicine for most things, and interestingly, we rarely got sick.

So, being healthy and in my twenties when the vaccines rolled out, I knew in advance that I wasn’t interested in getting “the shot.” In addition to this, I wanted to be sure I didn’t do anything to screw up my hormones or fertility, since I had recently gotten married and knew my husband and I wanted kids someday not too far away.

Then came the second wave of trials. I told as few people about my private medical decision as possible, because I was aware of the controversy and had been through a lot that year already. It also didn’t feel like something that was truly anyone else’s business, especially since I was still following all the health guidelines, including testing before attending public events like concerts, which was mandatory in Minneapolis at the time. However, others soon made it their business.

As Governor Walz announced vaccination requirements for state agency employees, he “urged other employers to do the same.” One of the music schools I was teaching for in Minneapolis had been open for in-person lessons since September 2020, utilizing masking, distancing, and regular piano sanitizing to make sure families, students, and teachers all felt comfortable, but now, following Walz’s suggestion, these measures suddenly weren’t enough. I received an email, while on vacation two weeks before the fall semester started, that it was vax or stay home for the 2021-22 school year. This school specializes in small group piano lessons for young children who already don’t do well online, and after a year of online school and activities, no one was really in the mood to suddenly switch their kid from in person to online just so they could stay with me as their teacher. My full schedule of 10 students went down to 1 within a day or so of this news, leaving me without my usual income for the indefinite future. I was, in effect, fired over my vaccine status. 

My boss at this music school had essentially nothing to say to my reasons for not getting the vaccine and had no apologies for compromising my financial stability with such short notice. I had had a suspicion that it would come to this at some point – she actually had a handmade doll of Dr. Fauci in the main music classroom, and had stated, sounding a lot like Walz, that as a school “we needed to do everything we could to combat the Delta variant.” Again, I was dealing with an ideology on a religious scale, complete with dogma and idols. That didn’t make it any less upsetting or any easier to fill my teaching schedule on my own at such short notice. 

Meanwhile, I had been preparing to perform for a friend’s wedding in October 2021. We had one group rehearsal so far, and I had been practicing the material for a couple of months. Shortly before the date of the wedding, my friend informed me that she and her fiancé had decided that they were going to have a vax-only wedding, including the performers. I could keep the $50 deposit, but was again out of a gig and was uninvited from a friend’s big day – a friend I have known since 6th grade. 

Closing Thoughts

Now that we know so much more about both Covid and the vaccines, like how natural immunity is an equivalent, if not longer lasting, defense than the vaccine, and that the vaccine doesn’t prevent the spread of the virus, that you can still contract Covid even with multiple booster shots, and that many women have had changes in their menstrual cycles after having the shot, there has been an odd silence from those who took these drastic measures during the rollout of the vaccines, and no word from Walz or anyone else from our local government who overstepped their elected role and created a general tone of hostility during the pandemic. In fact, it’s more likely that I could still be socially ostracized over my health choices than that anyone would decide they ought to apologize to me, or to anyone else with a story like mine.

Hindsight really is 2020. To this day, our city still isn’t the Minneapolis I’ve always known and loved. Crime rates have gone up, businesses have closed, and many areas that were burnt down have still not been rebuilt. So, as our governor, Tim Walz, joins Kamala Harris’s ticket as her VP pick for the 2024 election, I am reminded of all of the divisiveness and destruction that began for us four years ago. The atmosphere of antagonism and the permissiveness of violence that he, at worst, created and, at best, enabled are not things I personally would like to see from second in command in the White House. 

As we take stock of what we each lost and gained during that unique moment in all of our lives, there are lessons that we can bring into the present moment. For me, one of those lessons is that integrity, truth, and love should always come before deception, divisiveness, and destruction. Given his track record, I’m not sure that Walz could say the same. 

Support our cause and help women reclaim their femininity by subscribing today.