Police have learned a lot about Wade Michael Page since he walked into a Sikh temple in Wisconsin earlier this month and shot six worshipers before turning the gun on himself.
He was a member of the far-right punk band "End Apathy," a group, "bent on carrying out acts of neo-Nazi violence," according to the L.A. Times.
The 40-year-old ex-Army soldier had a deep hatred toward the non-white community and a history of violence.
Once, in an interview, he said, "Sometimes a savage beating is necessary, violence plays a big part of the skinhead life … sometimes violence gets out of hand and things happen that shouldn’t happen but at least it teaches people a lesson: the next time they won’t [expletive] with skinheads.”
It got us wondering how someone becomes this way.
How does someone become so full of hate they are driven to kill? Can someone that full of hate be changed?
Amy Rice | Aug 13, 2012 | 11:16am
It seems like there must be some degree of dehumanization involved for a hateful person to willfully destroy another person’s life. I don’t know how a person gets to that point.
But I do know that love—radical, life-transforming love—can make all the difference.
The Rev Deb Conklin | Aug 14, 2012 | 1:47pm
Hate is very often a result of fear. We hate what makes us afraid. Men, in particular, are taught that fear is unacceptable, so it gets translated into hate. It has always been true that the easiest way to create strong bonds within a group is to cut insiders off from those outside the group. Cults use this strategy very effectively. Today, far too many groups have begun to create and strengthen their internal solidarity by creating fear and hatred of the ‘other’ – the other race, the other religion, the other way of thinking…. Particularly in those groups that portray the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, it becomes easy to justify destroying that which we fear, because we now hate it, and see it as evil. And almost every belief system condones some form of action against that which it defines as evil. The best of every religion seeks to understand, respect, and appreciate the ‘other’. The worst of every religion seeks to make us afraid of, and express hatred for, the ‘other’.
Pearce Fujiura | Sep 1, 2012 | 8:17am
I have lots to say on this matter… First of all I love that Yoda has it right on this subject, “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.”
Dead on!
Second in defense of “Every religion” (Eastern faiths being a Large portion of that demographic pie globally), they do not ALL make us afraid of and express hatred for another.
That is simply untrue.
Sorry Deb, but you missed the mark on the last three sentences in my opinion, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Buddhist, Taoist, or Janist doctrine that seeks to make its practitioner fear anything at all.
But you are right in saying that is often the root of people violent actions are fear.
I just felt like I had to clarify in defense of the Buddhism that fear is in no way a part of our belief system. :)
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