Sikh Temple shooting brings two men from different worlds together
By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
On April 7, Arno Michaelis and Pardeep Singh Kaleka opened the First United Methodist Church’s Draw the Circle Wide lecture series with a program titled “The Gift of Our Wounds,” which drew an audience of more than 200.
Michaelis and Kaleka are founders of Serve 2 Unite (S2U) that aims to establish “a healthy sense of identity, purpose and belonging that diverts young people from violent, extremist ideologies, gun violence, school shootings, bullying and substance abuse, along with other forms of self-harm.”
Kaleka lost his father in the Aug. 5, 2012, Sikh Temple shooting in Oak Creek, and Michaelis was a former white supremacist that helped start a gang back in the late 1980s that helped produce that shooter.
Michaelis and Kaleka are also authors of “The Gift of Our Wounds,” which describes the development of their friendship after the shooting that claimed six lives, along with the gunman’s suicide.
During the presentation, Michaelis shared his life story as a former skinhead and punk musician who rose to leadership in a white supremacist organization.
Kaleka, whose father founded the Sikh Temple of Oak Creek, served as a police officer and then as an educator in inner city Milwaukee.
Despite living in a nice house and experiencing positive affirmations from adults, Michaelis admitted that as a teenager with an alcoholic dad, “behind the scenes I was suffering.” By 16, he was a “full-blown alcoholic” whose “second nature was to be violent” and for whom “hate was just another part of this world.”
He was drawn away from punk music to white power skinhead music. The songs, Michaelis said, “told me that I was a warrior for my people, the white race, and under threat (that) if we don’t fight back, white people will be no more.”
Michaelis went on to start a gang and a band that “radiated hostility out into the world, and the world gave it back to us.” A former information technology consultant, he added, “When you put hate and violence into the world, the world outputs more hate and violence for you.”
He described it as “sucking the life out of you.”
“Everything wrong with the world is Jewish people’s fault, black people’s fault, Latino people’s fault, Asian people’s fault, gay people’s fault. It’s everybody’s fault but ours.
“It was exhausting to cut myself off from the rest of society, which you have to do when you adopt the violent, extremist, fundamentalist ideology as your identity.”
He also described his seven-year involvement with hate groups this way: “When people treated me with kindness, that was a beacon of the world I could experience if I just let go of all my hate. In that kindness, these very brave people defied me. Everything I did back then was meant to provoke hostility and hatred in the world.”
In 1994, this skinhead rock star and single parent of an 18-month-old daughter couldn’t do it anymore.
“It finally hit me if I didn’t change my ways, death or prison was going to take me from my daughter, so I left hate groups.”
Moving from one extreme to another, for the next seven years Michaelis turned to “rave parties where the mantra was peace, love, unity and respect” and became a believer in the idea that human beings can love each other unconditionally. He became a Buddhist in 2009.
Meanwhile, Kaleka came to the United States (Milwaukee) at age 6 from rural India with his parents and siblings, escaping rebellion, curfews, bombings and escalating violence. His parents struggled with $1 an hour jobs but succeeded in making their way enough to buy a house in Bay View.
In appreciation for the opportunities afforded him, Kaleka became a police officer after graduating from Marquette University and later an educator working with high school youth in the same neighborhood that showed him “just how strong the human spirit can be.
“On Aug. 5, 2012, as a white supremacist gunman walked into our Sikh temple in Wisconsin,” Kaleka went on, “and took the lives of six precious souls, before he took his own life, I started to think differently. I wasn’t very spiritual or religious until then, but I started to think about when Christ on the cross said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,’ and wondered who he was talking to.
“I got to be more than just myself as the idea of forgiveness and compassion,” he said about his thinking after the tragic shooting while at the same time realizing that Jesus was also the idea of forgiveness and compassion.
“Each one of us has a different path. I didn’t know my path until a gunman walked into our temple.
“Oftentimes the world is trying to close us off because of the hurt and pain we are going through. It is your job, your duty, your dharma and your divine will to keep yourself open as the world is trying to close you off. We have to equip ourselves to see the divine outside of us and to see the divine within us, because if we don’t, then the solutions and our self-worth can only come from outside.”
Kaleka believes that it was that same divine will that had him reach out to Arno.
“Me and Arno share a common purpose,” he said, “and the purpose was healing from the aftermath of the deadliest hate crime that had happened in this country in nearly 50 years. … We can heal from this, but we can’t do it ourselves.”
Kaleka ended his remarks by recalling his first meeting with Arno, “filled with some anger, some angst, some fear, some relief,” at a Thai restaurant in Milwaukee.
“What really broke the ice,” Michaelis interjected, “was that he could see how much I was suffering and I could see how much he was suffering. And there was the common language of empathy.
“One of the things that we’re missing in our society now is not explanation of what’s happening or justification of why people believe what they believe, but we’re really losing empathy. We’re losing our ability to feel for one another.”
After answering questions from the audience and a reception, Michaelis and Kaleka gathered with school-age children for a special program.
