I was sixteen. Much younger than I am now. Or maybe seventeen — but you can probably figure it out. I had so many issues going on back then. Not that the Walz’s knew that.

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You might know one of them better as Tim Walz, the Democratic Nominee for Governor in Minnesota. At sixteen, I only knew him as Mr. Walz. Come Tuesday, November 6th, Minnesota will be voting for their next Governor and I would suggest you vote for Mr. Walz. In doing so, I believe you will be voting for a true Minnesotan Scholar.

My story is a bit strange, but that’s because I don’t know much about Minnesota politics anymore. I would ask “What’s Up Twin Cities!?” but it doesn’t really matter. Me? I keep up on things in Chicago, where I have lived for the past ten years. I miss Minnesota politics. To give you a lay of the land here in Illinois, one must dig up history. One former Illinois governor, Joseph F. Fifer, in court, defended the Illinois governor who served from 1921–1929, a Len Small who was famous for being tight with the Ku Klux Klan, from a corruption charge using the argument that the governorship had, “the divine right of kings.” The Federal Government, not surprisingly, disagreed. This still seems an active disagreement in Illinois, as four of our last seven governors have spent time in jail. But Minnesota? As I hear it from my parent’s dispatches, politics in Minnesota are still about Minnesota.

And maybe that’s why so few Minnesotans leave. It’s a great place to raise a family after all. I wouldn’t trade my experience growing up there for any other state we frequented growing up. And for me, it was the schools that made the difference. I am beyond indebted to the public education I received in Minnesota, and not just because both my parents are teachers, but because both Mrs. and Mr. Walz were my teachers too.

Mrs. Walz was my sophomore English teacher. To this day, I still remember finding it odd how much time Mrs. Walz spent on Transcendentalism — popularized by Ralph Waldo Emerson among a few famous others. We spent at least a month on the topic, if not more. One line of Emerson’s I have grown to cherish in revisiting him as an adult is, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” The sentiment was useful for me too. Three months had passed my planned graduate program graduation date in 2009 with no job offers. But suddenly, two entry-level positions magically materialized at once — one at a large stable blue-chip company and another at a smaller company that sold RVs. I wasn’t interested enough in Transcendentalism at twenty-three to know it was an Emerson quote, but I quite definitely considered Mrs. Walz’s emphasis when making my decision. I took that non-hobgoblin path to a small company called Camping World run by some guy named Marcus Lemonis. But that is a whole other story.

But to begin to tell you why I would call Mr. Walz a Minnesotan Scholar. I really need to tell you about The American Scholar, a speech Ralph Waldo Emerson gave at Harvard in 1837. In the speech, Emerson discussed how important one normal person could become in 1837. And so quickly too — but also how disenfranchised and removed large swaths of the population remained. That was weird for 1837 — power usually came to you through royalty or the military — so you either had it immediately or, maybe eventually. But clearly the last 60 years in America had shown that this was no longer a hard-and-fast rule of the world but possibly a past practice. To be a thinking man in those times though, you could be successful with that. Emerson disagreed that this was enough for America. And he used the dying lament of a great Swiss Romantic credited with making the whole of Switzerland literate by 1830 to make his point. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, after so much work ending illiteracy in a country that is now considered one of the happiest in the world, famously lamented, “I learned that no man in God’s wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.” How useful these thinking men become late in life.

Emerson rejected that Swiss argument as simple melancholy. And we should too. He said the problem was not the man, but the scholar himself. To blame this on the nature of man was to forget the nature of sovereignty — a manmade construct that one nation has full authority over itself and no other could impart their will upon it without that original nation’s consent. This sovereignty, it applied to the man as well. 1837's scholars, as Emerson saw them, were, “decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, [and eat] upon itself. There is no work for any one but the decorous and the complaisant.” Emerson argued that his audience, the top twenty-five graduates from Harvard in 1837, should not aim to just be a thinking man, but a man thinking. Doing so in this new nation, they would no longer be just a scholar, but an American Scholar. It is this speech that noted polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. — not to be confused with his son, a Supreme Court Justice — called “The Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”

If some of the problems of their time sound at all familiar to you, it should. And while my standing for judgment may be precarious, based upon my experiences, Mr. Walz is as close to someone I could call a Minnesotan Scholar that I ever met in my thirteen years in the state. But this is where we get into opinion and rose-colored glasses run strong in my family. But I still remember Mr. Walz’s AP Geography class. Seventeen years after I took it.

In Mr. Walz’s class, we tackled the topic of sovereignty with the same intensity that John Randle tackled Brett Farve. The excitement my classmates displayed for AP Geography might seem ludicrous to an outsider, but Mr. Walz had a reputation. He would start classes like most teachers and we followed his lesson plan. But as a class, we eventually learned that if someone asked the right question, Mr. Walz would just answer. And then he would keep answering. He made no secret that sometimes he was not certain, but he would get back to us. We never really kept track, until someone did. And then we all started keeping track.

Eager to actively engage with an adult who actively engaged with us, we quickly discovered that Mr. Walz was a total badass. Not only was he a Master Sergeant in the Army National Guard (total aside: he also happens to be the highest ranked enlisted officer to ever serve in Congress) but he taught in China through WorldTeach. This program started in 1986 by Harvard University students which partners with governments to provide volunteer teachers to meet local needs and promote responsible global citizenship. He did that in 1989. Three years after the program started. Mr. Walz worked for an education startup. In China. In 1989. Oh, and eventually he and Mrs. Walz spent summers taking kids from the Mankato area to China. Because, why not?

But in 2001, Mr. Walz was answering my AP Geography class’s questions. And Mr. Walz didn’t waste time. Within our first few classes, we got into a conversation about where Mr. Walz saw the United States from the perspective of his world travels. This was an AP course after all. He did his best to respond, but he didn’t sugar coat anything either. He explained that what America had done for the world over the past few centuries was remarkable, and for that, we should be proud. But our behavior as a country was not always perfect. As the bell rang for lunch, he summarized his thoughts quickly by saying, “I can’t tell you the where or when, but I think something will happen.” We shook our heads and were off to eat. Adults say the darndest things sometimes.

But something did happen. The next day. Someone interrupted our daily structured reading to tell us that a plane had crashed into the Twin Towers. I did not see it live on TV. But I didn’t have to. It was the only thing on the news for months after. Years after. In July, I saw the planes crash into the twin towers while visiting the Fritz Koenig retrospective at the Uffizi galleries in Florence, Italy. How can one watch the wanton destruction of so much life and not see it live? Every. Single. Time.

But two hours later, on September 11th, in Mr. Walz’s room, we were tension made form. We had stayed in school, but speculation ran rampant through the halls about that continuing. Despite this, we were also model behavior made form — because Mr. Walz was there. We all remembered what he had said.

On September 11th Mr. Walz didn’t know what to say. His statement the day before had been a coincidence. Like the rest of us, Mr. Walz had many emotions, chief among them a curiosity about what the U.S. Government would do. September 11th ripped our school apart over the 2001–2002 school year. Among other obvious topics, in Mr. Walz’s class, we discussed the League of Nations and why it failed. We discussed the United Nations and where it was failing. Too, we discussed how the nature of treaties established within the United Nations functioned so all nations could make plans. How productive could a country be if they were chronically looking to see who might invade them or take their livelihoods?

You, the reader, might be well situated to ask, “How important are treaties anyway?” I suppose my only answer would be to relate that around June 11, 1776, the Continental Congress, while preparing to secede from Britain, resolved to create three committees for three tasks: The creation of the Declaration of Independence, the creation of the Articles of Confederation, and the creation of a “Model Treaty” to guide foreign relations. These men were going to war. And Treaties were right up there. Right near the top.

But I am still so grateful for that school year. Because Mr. Walz helped me understand something that wasn’t obvious about treaties. At least to a teenage boy who rarely left Minnesota. During our discussions, I had wondered aloud how any nation would be held to account if they violated their treaties. Mr. Walz duly responded to the current state of international relations, explaining the United Nations Security Council, warts and all. But something still did not sit right with me. If this system was the world’s most tried and true solution, why were there still so many humanitarian issues tremoring the fault lines of the world?

“Mr. Walz,” I asked. “Why does any nation have to listen to these treaties?”

“You know, Kyle,” Mr. Walz responded, “it’s almost like we wrote this lesson plan together. Because they don’t.”

When your parents are teachers you see the work that goes into a lesson plan. That this was the best compliment I ever received while I was in high school, is only secondary to me now. As earlier, sovereignty applies to nations, but also to people. Understanding that no nation, and no person, is necessarily obligated to anything, that is a life lesson. And Mr. Walz gave life lessons to his students. Because Mr. Walz is a teacher. And not just in the sense that it looks cute on a placard or as a tagline to some political ad. Mr. Walz was one of a family of teachers at Mankato West High School that had the courage to look me in the eye and welcome me into the world we both lived in.

But yes. I got to discuss the nature of treaties and politics with the man currently running for Governor in Minnesota right after September 11th. Totally. Normal. Right? Well yeah, it was. He was my AP Geography teacher then. Because Mr. Walz didn’t use 9/11 as his springboard into politics — that event came years later.

As you’ll remember, Mrs. Walz is a teacher too. She most certainly knew about that idealized American Scholar Emerson so greatly cherished in his speech when Mr. Walz and a group of Mankato West students were unceremoniously interrogated at a George W. Bush rally after one student was found to have a John Kerry sticker, on his wallet.

And that’s really all I know about it.

I haven’t spoken with either of the Walz’s after graduating high school. And I don’t really plan to. The last time I even thought about Mr. Walz before discovering he was running for Governor was at a bar called Sidetrack in Chicago. I was there watching then President-Elect Barack Obama give his acceptance speech. No one else there knew it, but I was cheering twice as hard. My high school AP Geography teacher had become only the second-ever incumbent Democrat to hold onto Minnesota’s 1st congressional district. The second-ever. The district was created on March 4th, 1861– twenty-four years after Ralph Waldo Emerson told Americans to be Americans.

I could go on but, again, rose-colored glasses run in my family. And really, all I hope to impart that Mrs. and Mr. Walz, as teachers, very much helped me become who I am today and how I think Mr. Walz, as Governor, will help all Minnesotans become who you will want to be tomorrow. As I write this from Illinois, you have no idea how lucky you are to have him.

I honestly don’t know where I’ll be on Tuesday, November 6th, 2018. But wherever that is, I’ll be cheering for Mr. Walz like my Grandmother used to cheer for Harmon “Hit-a-home-run” Killebrew.

The Walz’s deserve it.