Members of the Minnesota Lynx — of different races — emerged from their locker room the other night wearing T-shirts that read, “Change Starts With Us,” in reference to what feels the Daily Shooting Du Jour in our headlines. Truer T-shirts were never printed. Because it does start with us. With me. And you. And every person reading this. And every person not reading this.

And so we begin today with the following premise: This country works best when we include everyone of all colors, religions, ancestries and orientations who learn with, play with and learn about each other.

If you disagree or dismiss it as more idealistic than practical, let me ask this: How are we doing so far?

No longer is the transcendent idea of the melting pot applicable in a country where the pots and the kettles are shouting damnation at one another and shooting one another. Learn about each other? Please. Separation is easier. Flipping on the television or radio and listening to some blatherer reinforce and intensify his or her audience’s predispositions and prejudices is much easier.

Except that separation begets fear, which begets anger, which begets exactly where so many of our self-appointed cultural referees are today.

Change starts with us. It starts with me. It starts with you. It starts with learning about people and things different than we are. It starts with us daring to be different. It means opening a book. It means shaking a strange hand. It means opening your ears and closing your mouth.

I was reminded of this the other day standing in line at Stop & Shop, where I ran into two old friends: Jerry and Susan Picardi of Waterford. They’re the quintessential example. They dared to be different. They opened their minds and their hearts and their home.

The Picardis, a white couple already with grown children, adopted a young man from the school at which Susan taught several years ago now. They adopted a black kid named Davonta Valentine, who only became the most popular kid at Waterford High School. He’s all grown up now, a college graduate, working man and bon vivant.

Their family portrait is what we’re supposed to stand for.

Jerry and Susan saved Davonta.

Davonta saved Jerry and Susan.

So I ask: Are we ready to become Jerry and Susan? Actually, scratch that. We needn’t do the extraordinary. Just the mundane. Instead of believing the same rumors, subscribing to the same theories and swearing by the same omens, how about we try to learn about the new and different?

Are you willing to take that personal responsibility?

Are you willing to stop being so damn afraid of that with which you aren’t familiar and actually trying to learn about it? About them? I’m not asking you to dig ditches. Or work in the coal mines. Just open your minds. Or a book. Or a hand. Because only then will the violence stop.

And it’s not going to stop. Know why? Read the following from Dale Hansen, a reporter in Dallas:

“I'm in my office, watching the (Texas Rangers’) game, and then all hell breaks loose in our city,” Hansen wrote last week. “Reporters in our newsroom were scrambling. Producers were yelling. We turned off the lights, just in case ... and I kept watching the game. It was another shooting in America. It was in our city this time and police officers were being killed, but it was a couple of blocks away and the Rangers were being shut out.

“This is what I have become. This is what too many of us have been for a long time now. We'll fly our flags at half-mast, we'll say all the right things, we'll make promises we won't keep, and then, nothing will change.

“Our lives will go on, while the lives of so many others won't, because we expect it now and we accept it. It was not just an attack on the Dallas police, it was an attack on our basic humanity and the common decency we used to cherish in America.”

Hansen is correct.

Unless change starts with us.

With me.

And you.

And just a few simple acts of learning. Or are they acts of humanity?

Turns out we can really learn something from sports. Maybe it feels counterintuitive to suggest that answer is a locker room. But there’s no other place in America that trumpets a more practical example of the melting pot.

Think about it: Every day in multiple sporting venues, people of various colors, backgrounds ethnicities and beliefs learn about each other through working together for something. They don’t necessarily like each other all the time, but their existence together fosters an unwitting tolerance for others.

And so now as this country disentangles itself from another shooting, perhaps all of us can look to sports — and the locker room — for salvation. And how locker rooms often produce relationships that extend beyond all cultural barriers.

Think about that.

I am.

Because change starts with me.

How about you?

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.