Author: Pardeep Kaleka

It has become painfully clear to the world that our President is racist. Using words to describe his temperament is the first step to defining his condition. Hanging a label around his neck offers a type of relief that exonerates our personal anxiety about the situations surrounding him. But it does not address the lingering issues beyond Trump, that persist in a world where we see ourselves and others through the lens of comparative worth. The toxicity of viewing another human as having less or more worth than another is nothing new. Even a superficial look through a history...

December 14 marks the five-year remembrance of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, which took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults, marking the unimaginable turning into a very dark reality. Like most, I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was teaching class that morning when a colleague came into my classroom to inform me of the ongoing coverage. A gunman had walked into an Elementary school in Connecticut and was murdеring children. The news immediately triggered things locked away inside me. In an instant I was reliving the mass-murder that took...

On October 2, Milwaukee and the country woke to the nauseating feelings behind yet another act of dоmеstіc tеrrоrism, with the headlines reading “Las Vegas attack is the deadliest mass shooting in American history.” At 10:08 pm Las Vegas local time the night before, the Route 91 Harvest Festival erupted in gunfire. A consistent onslaught of rifle-fire riddled the crowd, as people were trampled attempting to avoid the assault. Reports continue to change because the situation is still developing, but latest information has 59 dеаd and 527 hurt. Consistent to the modus operandi of other mass shootings in recent...

All across the United States, school boards are having discussions and preparing teachers to be armed with a handgun at schools. More than a thousand educators from 12 states have already taken part in a 3-day firearms training course in Ohio. Some of the funding was provided by pro-gun organizations, and yet other support came in by donations received after the Sandy Hook. That tragedy took the lives of 20 children and 6 staff members on December 14, 2012 by shooter Adam Lanza. The rationale for arming educators is the same rationale that we have heard over and over...

This past weekend marked the 5-year remembrance of one of the worst race-based, religious-based, ethnic-based hаte crіmеs committed on American soil. The shооter was an affiliated white supremacist, ex-military operative named Wade Page. In his wake of tеrrоr, he left six dеаd, one critically injured, and three others hurt, before he turned the gun to himself to take his own life. One of the victims of his rampage was my father, and Temple President, Satwant Singh Kaleka. The entirety of the murdеr-suicide lasted only 6 minutes, but the impact is still being felt 5 years later by an entire...

Residents of Milwaukee have both a local and national identity, as citizens of Wisconsin and America. Headlines from across the country report terrible things that do not reflect the local community, yet the city faces its own complexity of issues. For so many national issues it is easy to turn a blind eye because they do not have a local footprint. But much of the national dialogue shapes actions and discussions in our neighborhoods across the County. The United States has long advertised itself as the world’s beacon for a civil society. The truth may be that it has...