The funeral of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old African-American shot dead by a white police officer on Aug. 9, grabbed the nation’s attention not because of the attendance of celebrities, but because his very public death opened up and laid bare the racial wounds of a community, of a region and of a nation.

One of those celebrities, the Rev. Al Sharpton, addressed the divide that has been made clear in the days since Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shot Brown, and protests turned to rioting as the world watched a city on edge.

In recent days, friends and supporters of Wilson have come to his defense, rallying at a south-side bar and taking to social media to defend the policeman’s actions, even while the facts of the case remain unclear.

Wilson’s supporters have the right to support him, Sharpton said at the funeral for the man he shot. “But if they come to support the officers, they’re supporters,” he said. “But if we come to support the family, we’re dividing the country.”

Indeed, the past two weeks of unrest in the St. Louis region have brought attention to not just racial divides we have ignored for too long, but our country’s difficulty, magnified in recent years, to find common ground on most issues. It’s not just race. It’s climate change. It’s Obamacare. It’s Gaza. It’s war and peace. Our nation is divided. Ferguson is just one place where the division is laid bare.

To some, for instance, the mere mention of Sharpton’s name causes them to close their ears. On MSNBC, the cable news channel where Sharpton works as host, Brown was a gentle soul who didn’t deserve to die. On Fox News he’s a thug of questionable character.

There is no in between.

The truth, however, almost always lives in that space between the extremes.

The “in between” is where we must be if we are to have the serious conversations, and take the necessary action, that the underlying angst boiling over as a result of the Ferguson uprising has revealed.

Why not use a funeral as that opportunity to find common ground?

Laying a child to rest should bring people together, to feel the empathetic pain of loss.

Most of us know the pain of loss, whether it has been a parent, child, grandparent, friend or co-worker. That pain speaks to our common experience, and it is that experience that we must tap if we as a region and a nation are going to use the energy unleashed in Ferguson for good.

So where do we start finding those common threads that bind us?

Let’s begin with words.

However we describe what we think happened on Aug. 9, “thug” and “racist” are words we should try to avoid. Perhaps before we comment on social media, we should ask ourselves a question: Would I say this to the face of everybody I know who might see this online?

From our political leaders on down, as we move from moment to movement, it’s important that we not lose sight of our common connection to this story. It’s possible to support the very important and dangerous work police officers do while also recognizing that they should be accountable for mistakes. It’s absolutely OK to believe our region’s history has been unfairly discriminatory to African-Americans while admitting to not comprehending the transformation from protest to looting.

We ought to be able to have a discussion about past political errors without completely writing off our political opponents.

Last week, we lamented the numbers in the recent Pew Research Center poll on the nation’s reaction to Ferguson, which showed a stark racial divide in reactions to the killing of Brown.

Yet there is also hope in some of those numbers.

Among whites, Republicans and political independents, for instance, there is a higher percentage who believe that the Brown killing raises important questions about race than just a year ago believed the killing of Trayvon Martin did.

Perhaps that is a sign that the nation is closer to having the serious conversation about race we have been avoiding for too long.