The Gift of Our Wounds

by Arno Michaelis

  The road sign said ten miles to Janesville. “Almost there!” I said, slapping my hand on the steering wheel. The dash lights flickered and Pardeep chuckled. He said his dad drove the same beat-up Toyota pickup truck forever. He bought it with tons of miles on it, way back when he was still working at a gas station. It was all he could afford at the time, but he’d kept it through all of his successes, from owning his first gas station to buying multiple gas stations, then rental properties, and a nice house in the suburbs. Even after he was in a position to drive whatever he wanted, he still chose the same tatty old truck.

  That was the kind of guy Pardeep’s father was. Until his death, he did all of his own maintenance on his properties. When a lightbulb needed changing in one of the canopies that sheltered the fuel pumps from weather, Satwant never asked one of his attendants to change it. He pulled the rusty Toyota up to the pumps, set a ten-foot folding ladder on the roof of the cab, then climbed the ladder to the top step—the one marked NOT A STEP. DON’T STAND ON THIS—and reached up with the fluorescent bulb without shedding a single bead of sweat on his turban.

  It wasn’t that his dad was cheap, Pardeep said. He’d give the shirt off his back to a stranger if they needed it, and he had. He was humble.

  “That’s fucking awesome!” I said.

  “You know what my dad’s favorite music was?” Pardeep asked, grinning.

  “What?”

  “Punjabi hip-hop. He had that broke-ass old Toyota, but he had a bumpin’ audio system in it, with his music blasting, and everyone heard it, wherever he went. Sixty-year-old dude with a turban and beard bumpin’ that shit!”

  I could see it in my mind and I started to laugh. “No shit, man? Punjabi hip-hop?”

  “Oh he could get into American hip-hop, too!” Pardeep said. “He used to rock out to Naughty by Nature when their song came on the radio. He didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but he’d sing along.”

  Pardeep bounced up and down, throwing his hands in the air, singing, “O.P.P.!” with a thick Punjabi accent, the way his father had. It was too much to take. The thought of Satwant Singh Kaleka jammin’ out to Naughty by Nature, waving his hands and shouting, “Uh-Pee-Peeee!” was hilarious to the point where I nearly had to pull over to the side of the road.

  Par and I roared until tears streamed down our cheeks. Each time we’d catch our breath to try getting a glimpse of where we were going, one of us would bust out laughing again.

  As I shook with laughter, my earlier fears about going back to Janesville seemed to retreat. In the back of my mind, I knew we could still potentially be walking into a dangerous situation, but Par and I were in it together.

  We were still trying to compose ourselves when we pulled into the community college where the gig was being held. The campus looked pretty generic, with a lot of one-story buildings spread out over a wide-open space. Parking the car in a desolate lot, we went in search of the room where our talk was scheduled to take place. I had low expectations going in. I figured we might get a handful of white folks.

  When we got to the right place, we found that the one-hundred-seat venue was filled to capacity. It was standing room only. Looking out over the audience, I saw one black man and an Asian woman. Everyone else was white. Why would that surprise me? The town was still 90 percent white. A uniformed security guard stood at the door, which brought back all of the concerns I had about being there. A rare bout of nerves set in. Oh boy, I thought. This is going to be a party, an all-white crowd chomping at the bit to take off our heads. Pardeep read my thoughts. “Security!” he said, smiling. “That’s a good thing, Arno!” Yeah, I guess.

  Pardeep

  Arno’s danger warning rang in my head as we waited to be introduced. You have to be hypervigilant, he’d said during our conversation in the car. He’d made the comparison between white supremacists and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda—people on the fringe who used terror and violence to gain attention and recruits. What better headline for a crew of racist skinheads than attacking a venue where a turncoat and the son of a murdered Sikh were speaking about peaceful coexistence? Maybe I should be more worried than I am, I thought. Except that I knew I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do. It was as if a spirit were pushing me. A higher power has me, I told myself. A higher power has us.

  Arno

  Waiting to begin our talk, I scanned the room, looking for any signs of potential trouble. No arms inked with swastikas or “14 Words.” No shaved heads or black shitkicker boots.

  The audience greeted us with warm applause. Smiling to conceal my suspicions, I told my story first. “On August 5,” I said, “a man who I used to be walked into the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin and murdered six people because they had brown skin, because they had turbans on their heads. One of those people murdered was Pardeep’s father.”

  I went on to emphasize that the reason I was no longer that person was because of the kindness I’d received from people I’d once hated the most. “Black people, Jewish people, Latino people, gay people, who treated me as a human being when I refused to acknowledge their humanity,” I said. “Their acts of kindness planted seeds that made it more and more difficult for me to keep practicing the kind of hate and violence necessary to hurt people.”

  Turning the program over to Par, I said, “Pardeep’s dad would have been one of those benevolent people, if only I’d had the privilege of meeting him. So many times since I’d met Pardeep, I’ve found myself wishing I had.”

  Pardeep

  I began with my parents’ story of traveling from India to the United States with nothing more than a few dollars and assimilating into American culture through hard work and honorable intentions. They came here pursuing the American dream, and they had it until August 5. “Nevertheless,” I said, “all is not lost. My father is as much an inspiration in death as he was in life. He would have told you that the storms in our lives are not the absence of God; rather, the response to those storms is the existence of God.” God had been omnipresent in our lives since the tragedy. People of all faiths and all colors and all cultures—from around Wisconsin and the country and the world—had gone out of their way to embrace us when we were in the throes of grief. That was the presence of God.

  I often wondered if Wade Michael Page had looked in my father’s eyes before he pumped five shots into him at close range. If he had, he would have seen a man who exemplified the great ideals that our nation was built on: dedication. Hard work. Service. And, ultimately, sacrifice. I often wondered about how my mother must have felt as she hid in the pantry, not knowing what had become of my father. I was told that lovers could feel each other’s pain. Mom, did you feel the shots as they slammed into Dad’s body? Did you feel the one that crushed his spine, leaving him helpless in the face of death?

  “My father was a deeply religious man whose dying words were a call to God to dispel darkness in the world with the light of love, compassion, and guidance. He died praying not for himself, but for this,” I said, motioning toward the audience. “For you, the crowd that is here today in the spirit of love and understanding. And the next crowd. And the crowd after that. We have to be radically empathetic with each other, with the person next to us, with the person we just met today. Our message is to please commit to action for the betterment of humanity. My father and the others died praying for that.”

  Arno

  Looking out over the audience, I saw quivering lips and tears of compassion as Pardeep spoke. I realized that the people who’d come out in the bitter cold to hear us were good and well intentioned. They were there, not for any nefarious reason, but because they wanted to understand. They wanted the same things Pardeep and I did. To make the world better through love and understanding each other.

  We spoke for more than an hour. Afterward, a long line snaked around the room. No one seemed to want to leave. We hung around for a while longer, until everyone had been greeted. One woman in particular had really touched me. She said she’d grown u
p in Janesville and was always embarrassed by its reputation as a haven for racists. She had been planning to move away, but her daughter got pregnant so she’d decided to stay. In doing so, she promised herself that she would do something meaningful to make Janesville a better place. Staying true to herself, she had joined the diversity council, the group that invited us to speak. I was humbled by her story, and I berated myself for not giving the audience the benefit of the doubt simply because of the color of their skin. Judging them for being white was no better than when I used to judge people because they were black. I felt like an asshole. Another lesson learned.

  ELEVEN

  FORGIVENESS

  The blessed will grow a crop of forgiveness while the sufferers lose their roots.

  Guru Ram Daas

  Pardeep

  Driving out of Janesville, toward home, I realized something. I loved Arno, loved him like a brother. Yes, he could be direct to the point of being brash. He had a tendency to be stubborn and a little bit irritable, and you could never call him before noon if you didn’t want your head handed to you. But any lingering doubts I’d had about his true self or his real heart had completely evaporated.

  Arno was quirky, no doubt about it. But he was also the kindest, most genuine guy I knew. I’d watched him do things quietly that spoke volumes about his character. The guy walked down the street plugging expired meters for strangers! The lattice of tattoos, the gravelly voice, the rough language that rolled off his tongue like melting ice cream, none of it could obscure his goodness. His commitment to redeeming himself for the transgressions of his early life and his passion for social harmony were rock-solid real.

  To me, Arno represented what was great about our country. He’d changed his ways and devoted his life to fighting the hatred he’d once embraced. That made him a hero in my eyes. In the short time I’d known him I’d learned so much about redemption and forgiveness. Arno showed me that people are basically good, but that sometimes one’s pain and anguish translate to violence. People who are hurting sometimes hurt others.

  One day Arno and I were talking and I told him I wanted to get a tattoo in remembrance of my father and the others who died at the temple. Arno was obviously an expert on the subject and he offered up his personal tattoo artist, who had inked the symbols of humanity and compassion over Arno’s hate tattoos from his racist skinhead days. Then Arno had another idea. How about if we got matching tattoos?

  We made an appointment together and decided on a tattoo with the date of the shooting under a splotch of red blood on our left palms. Scully, the tattoo artist, explained to us that palm skin sheds more than other parts of the body, so the tattoos would probably lose color over time. Go ahead and do it, we said.

  Four years have passed since then and my ink is showing signs of wear. What the tattoo represents, however, will never fade: the impact that six beautiful souls have had on our world, even in death, and a friendship that was born of the tragedy that continues to thrive.

  After my father’s death, I wouldn’t say the name Wade Michael Page. I wouldn’t allow anyone to say it in my presence. That’s how much I hated him. But spending time with Arno—understanding that this decent human being, someone who was changing the world, had once been motivated to hate by his own broken heart—opened my eyes to the possibility that Page, too, hated for lack of love. That made me sad. What made me even sadder was that no one had cared enough to show Page the love we all deserve. If someone had shown him love, my father and the others might still be alive.

  One of our great gurus wrote, “Dispelled is anger as forgiveness is grasped.” My brother, Arno, has taught me how to forgive Wade Page, and that has freed me to live the purposeful life my father would have expected of me.

  Our Sikh scripture says, “Forgiveness is as necessary to life as the food we eat and the air we breathe.

  “Where there is forgiveness, there is God.”

  TWELVE

  SERVE 2 UNITE

  Let wisdom be your food and compassion your guide.

  Guru Nanak Dev Ji

  Arno

  Inspired by adversity, Serve 2 Unite began as a nebulous idea to educate the public about Sikhism. It quickly grew into a forum to address hate with an ongoing practice of creativity and compassion rooted in the Sikh principles of oneness, service to others, and the pursuit of relentless optimism. By 2013, with a lot of help from the brilliant nonprofit Arts @ Large, we introduced the concept of seeing “’yourself in the other” in Milwaukee schools and later in communities across the country. In collaborating with educators, policy makers, activists, and youth, Serve 2 Unite has inspired people of all backgrounds to value this common humanity and embrace the merits of living genuine, honest lives as peacemakers.

  In our mission as brothers to bring about healing and wage peace, Pardeep and I have shared our stories and the Serve 2 Unite philosophy with people throughout the United States and around the world. It was one of those endeavors that led to an invitation in the spring of 2017 to Groton, Massachusetts, a town not unlike Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Both are quintessential American towns where the citizens are generally good, hard working, and happy to lend each other a hand. But people in Groton were struggling with the difficulties that come with demographic shift, something we saw often in our travels. In recent years, the Hindu population in Groton had burgeoned from thirty families to three thousand, and some locals were voicing concerns about the building of a Mandir, a Hindu temple in a traditionally Christian town. Before the temple shooting, Oak Creek had suffered similar growing pains during an influx of Punjabi families a few years earlier when the Gurudwara became a beacon that led more Indians to Wisconsin. Understanding went a long way toward acceptance of the Sikh community in Oak Creek, and for many that came after the tragedy. We do not want this to be the case in any other town.

  In response to the strife that was happening in Groton, the local interfaith group, in partnership with town government and the police chief, had organized a screening of Waking in Oak Creek, a beautifully crafted short documentary produced by the nonprofit Not In Our Town, about the shooting in Oak Creek and how the community came together in response by implementing policy and public reform. After the film, Par and I joined the police chief, Donald Palma, and the president of the Groton Interfaith Council, Shua Khan Arshad, for a panel discussion. We had a great conversation with each other and the audience as we explored ways to think past fear to reveal a true understanding of the value and wonder of human diversity.

  During the discussion we learned that Town Selectman Jack Petropoulis had introduced a measure to place stone monuments inscribed with ALL ARE WELCOME at the intersections leading into town as part of an initiative to welcome new immigrants and ease concerns of the townsfolk. The issue was coming up for a vote, and Jack worried it would fail. When he shared his frustration over the resistance he’d gotten to the idea, we urged him to press on with love, devotion, and faith. We also suggested adding service projects that all could take part in. Taking a page from our Serve 2 Unite student program, we suggested engaging the community in projects that gave members—old and new—equitable ownership and voice.

  A few weeks after we returned home, Jack sent us this email:

  Hi Arno and Pardeep,

  I want to thank you for visiting our community last week, to tell you what it meant to me, and to tell you what I think it meant in a larger sense. First of all, thank you. I understand that you took time for us and I appreciate the commitment that it takes to do that. Secondly your message was heard loud and clear. Your encouragement to carry on buoyed my spirits and caused many of us to see things in ways that we have never experienced before. Lastly I want you to know that your talk inspired me to bring forward (the issue) to our town meeting with renewed commitment to the importance of the effort. Your comments of “even if it does not pass you will have moved the bar” were so true. More importantly your recounting of, and response to, the events of August 2012 served as both a warning
and a roadmap for all of us. I went into our Town Meeting determined to carry the torch that I picked up that evening regardless of the outcome. I took the liberty of using your talk, your history and your encouragement in my message at Town Meeting. The vote passed by 27 in a room of 300. I know for a fact that there were people who came in ready to vote “no” thinking that they knew all they needed to know about the initiative, who changed their minds and voted in favor.… You made a difference in our town.

  One of the many reasons Pardeep and I get along so well is that we both like to cause a bit of trouble. My taste for troublemaking almost killed me and others back in the day, but now Par has shown me how to use it in the best way possible: by defying hate and violence. Pardeep says that to him, forgiveness is vengeance. Kindness is the most devastating weapon against the suffering from which all violence stems. Love is the antidote to the fear and loneliness that seeds hate.

  When Wade Page walked into the temple in Oak Creek, he sought to terrify the Sikh community, which in his eyes would have looked like a reflection of himself, into submission. He wanted them to be fearful and hateful. He wanted them to renounce their faith in Chardi Kala—relentless optimism, especially in the face of struggle.

  He failed. Miserably.

  Because of his pathetic attempt to sow strife and discord, the Sikh community of Wisconsin and of the world is that much more engaged with everyone else. More people know what Sikhs are all about: faith, love, and hard work.