Author: Pardeep Kaleka

Pardeep Kaleka Milwaukee Independent We are living in a time where it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish the believability of people. Social media is helping to foster a society of influencers, condoners, and amplifiers. It seems the more followership a person has, the more they are celebrated for their public persona. However, this public persona of success can actually mask a private misery. Over my past twenty years of public service in Milwaukee, I have often found myself thinking about how suffering can both help and hurt people. Help in the manner that pain can create genuine bonds...

Stochastic Terrorism is a little known term but well utilized strategy to incite violence. After the attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue, it is a term that we should get more accustomed to using and identifying. Popularly defined as “the use of mass, public communication, usually against an individual or group which incites or inspires acts of terrorism which are statistically probable but seem to happen at random.” Stochastic Terrorism has been a strategy utilized to justify anything from historical genocides to contemporary violence. I call this type of Terrorism the Eddie Haskell effect. Eddie Haskell, the fictional...

Over recent weeks I have found myself very hesitant to post anything on social media, and I especially recognize my refrain from posting controversial material. While part of this is due to having limited energy and time, and not wanting to exhaust that on the world wide web. However, another crucial factor I feel is that social media is decreasing my ability to be creative. It is incidentally making me boring and predictable by subconsciously posting topics for the yay-sayers. I am also seeing this play out in our daily lives, as our social media posts garner very predictable...

The reality of our society lacking compassion can be hard to swallow, especially with the awareness that the condition may have always been that way. The recent headlines in the news regarding the separation of immigrant families has us once again questioning if Milwaukee’s society, and the very foundation of our country, has any compassion. There are two very polar opposite views on the issue, and examining them from both extremes of the spectrum offers a better perspective on the social forces at work. On one side there are those who are very sympathetic to the plight of immigrants...

As Donald Trump addressed the issue of California sanctuary city laws on May 17, he went on his latest rant about illegal immigrants in what has become a sustained assault on the psychology of Americans with his campaign to dehumanize people who are not white. Fresno County Sheriff Margret Mims conveniently set the stage with her comment, “There could be [a] MS-13 gang member I know about, if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about them.” Trump responded, without mentioning anything specifically about MS-13, “We have people coming into the country or trying to come...