And so once again we have another cause celebre that produces the same outcome. People talking out of their tailpipes — shoot, ready, aim — with a pathological refusal to listen.

It's like this now for a basketball player at Connecticut College, a young man named Lee Messier, whose story stemming from a domestic violence incident at Conn over the weekend has prompted police to begin an internal investigation. Messier, who posted photos on Facebook showing several bruises, believes city police officers mistreated him.

This just in: I wasn't there. Most of the people reading this weren't either. I have no idea what happened. Neither do you. Complicated. Hence, I'm not taking sides. I can't. How could I? How could you?

What's truly troubling — at least to me — goes beyond the Xs and Os of this particular incident. It's the pronouncements from the masses who don't understand (and don't want to) the significance of a line from "To Kill A Mockingbird." The words of Harper Lee: "You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

That's the enduring lesson here. Not what Lee Messier did or didn't do. What the police did or didn't do. But the bigger picture suggestion that we all need to shut up. Now. And listen. And understand that we bring conflicting opinions because our personal experiences almost always dictate the tone of the discourse.

And so if your experiences differ from mine — which they always will — why can't we pipe down and listen to each other?

A particular reader comment on this story from theday.com struck me as perhaps the most fundamentally important thing we need to grasp — especially white people — moving forward. It was written by a former basketball player at New London High who uses the name "Branch."

"At the end of the day," he wrote, "the more I read these comments I realize that people just have different opinions from their different experiences. From my perspective, I see a lot of people giving opinions on situations they just have never experienced."

The young man wrote about his experiences with New London police officers, prefacing it by acknowledging, "of course every officer isn't bad."

His story: "I was stopped and frisked with dogs for the horrible offense of walking home from basketball practice. As five unmarked cop cars jumped the curb to get to me and my friends, for that second, I thought my little 17-year old life was over. (They put) their hands all over my body searching for drugs but only came up with basketballs — as other cops not searching us had their guns out. After speaking to us ... they realized all black kids aren't drug dealers.

"To apologize, they brought over the token black cop to talk to us at our next basketball practice with all officers at the scene nowhere to be found. So basically some guy up there trying to defend an incident he wasn't even at with the same blindness I see in these comments."

Pause to reflect: Have you ever been stopped by law enforcement and felt your life was in danger? I've been stopped, sure. But never threatened. I can't imagine what that feels like. I can't imagine having a gun plunked near me, wondering whether the scariest form of onomatopoeia will be the final sound I ever hear: bang, boom.

I have a better idea now why so many people are fearful and suspicious. It's their experience. I'm not about to dismiss it. I'm certainly not about to lecture them.

"If your neighborhood wasn't militarily occupied by the police like mine was growing up, I just don't think you're qualified to have these conversations," the young man from New London wrote. "If you've never been harassed and frisked by the police just because your mom asked you walk to the store and get a juice, of course you can't understand why people are upset.

"Or driving in the car from college and dropping a friend off who happened to be a white girl. Then getting pulled over and the cop telling her she could do better after asking her 30 times if she was OK. As a citizen, I know I can't say or do anything, because I'll probably be killed, the cop will go unprosecuted and someone will try to dig up the day I got suspended from school on senior skip day and somehow they'll spin that into I should have been shot."

Again: You may disagree. You may wrinkle your nose at the hyperbole. But can you deny that this kid's experiences have shaped his outlook, much like suburbanites' more sheltered experiences shape theirs?

Shoot, ready, aim. It's got to stop. We need to start listening. And understanding that different people from different backgrounds have different life experiences. Doesn't make them right. Or wrong. Just human.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.