Unable to Hate What You Know
The return to the principle of seva reaches beyond individuals or families or even the walls of the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin. A group of younger members in particular began the group Serve 2 Unite to incorporate seva in outreach to the broader community.
“We feel like we have a voice, and I think the kids, the adults, they all feel it,” says Pardeep Kaleka, whose father was president of the gurdwara. “Before, most people just concentrated on going out to their jobs and doing their jobs, coming home. I feel like now the Sikh community feels part of the broader American community, so they do more for them. We want to get involved in politics, we want to get involved in making a safer America.”
Photo by: Stephanie Wezelman
After the shooting, many from outside the gurdwara—businesses, politicians and citizens of Oak Creek, greater Wisconsin, the nation and other nations—paid their respects. Community support lines the walls of the gurdwara. In the room where worshipers eat hang white laminated posters roughly five feet in length covered in multicolor patterns of handwritten notes expressing sympathy. They create a continuous border just below grand pictures of the Golden Temple, the holiest place for Sikhs, and images recounting the stories of the faith.
And now through Serve 2 Unite, the youth aim to foster relationships and understanding among groups both religious and secular. Under the “outreach” arm of the gurdwara, Serve 2 Unite has a core group of about ten members between the ages of 18 and 35. The organization seeks to affect legislation like gun control and promote an anti-hate message through education.
“It’s definitely moved into an outreach effort,” Pardeep Kaleka says. “Somebody told me a while back that you can’t hate what you know, and I think a lot of times we get so involved into our own life that we never reach out to help others. And so it became my mission to basically move in and let people know who we are and what we stand for, not just how we look.”
The younger members of the gurdwara plan to gather members of mosques, synagogues, churches, LGBT groups and others to build mutual understandings through the common goal of improving the community, says Kanwardeep “Guggi” Singh Kaleka, a teacher at the gurdwara’s school and an integral member of Serve 2 Unite.
A Different Perspective
The desire to explain the inexplicable also led Pardeep Kaleka to transcend his own anxiety and preconceptions. On Oct. 22, he sat down in a Thai restaurant on the east side of Milwaukee with a man who could offer insight into what Wade Michael Page had experienced, what made him want to attack and kill. That man is Arno Michaelis, a former white supremacist.
Michaelis now runs the anti-hate nonprofit Life After Hate. The organization incorporates both former perpetrators and victims of violence and promotes the practices of compassion, forgiveness and kindness.
Over notoriously spicy food and the course of three hours, Michaelis gave “Par,” as he calls Pardeep Kaleka, an answer to the question everyone seemed to be asking: Why?
“I used to be mad at this guy [Page] because obviously you’re angry for a while,” Pardeep Kaleka says of the answer. “Talking to Arno from Life After Hate has made me almost see the guy and feel bad for him. Like you empathize with the guy…The shooter was going through his own living hell.”
Michaelis transitions without a moment’s hesitation into a description of his role in building the white power movement and what it’s like to live in that world. In the moment when Pardeep Kaleka asked for answers, Michaelis told him it was an honor to be allowed to explain how such a “horrible event” came to be.
“Essentially the [white supremacist] is living in a state of constant terror,” Michaelis says. “When you walk out of your house, every waking moment of your day is spent in fear, because everyone who isn’t white is, by default, an enemy. They’re there to kill you. They’re there to wipe your people out. And everyone who is white who isn’t a fellow racist like you is a traitor.”
Page, Michaelis says, had been practicing hate and violence for more than a decade before the shooting. It is a life in which any joy, love or happiness disappears in the face of hatred and ignorance.
This explanation helped Pardeep Kaleka understand and move forward—though he makes it clear that doesn’t justify Page’s actions. Page’s world was his own prison, he says, and in that moment, Pardeep Kaleka began to feel empathy for the man who killed his father and members of his community.
Now Pardeep Kaleka and Michaelis are joining forces to spread the message of anti-hate in schools throughout the area. A social studies teacher himself, Pardeep Kaleka says he sees kindness perceived as a sign of weakness among his students. They plan to speak first at Cudahy High School about bullying. Principal Christopher Haeger says he hopes the talk will help students understand that there is a range of hate, from that exemplified so painfully in the temple shooting to bullying between students.
But when Michaelis visits schools to speak, his talks tend to focus on practicing compassion, kindness and forgiveness rather than the negative impacts of bullying and violence. The message: The same small acts of kindness that made it impossible for Michaelis to continue in the white power movement can change other lives, too.
That’s also the message Pardeep Kaleka conveys.
“No matter where you are in your life, change can happen,” he says.
Related Posts:
