When I was six years old, I remember one specific time where I sat at the lunch table with my friends, listening to them talk as I ate. I had enjoyed perhaps two of my six chicken nuggets, when Principal Rodriguez herself came to find me. She requested that I get my things together and told me my mom was here to get me. I was perplexed, but thoughts of getting a free day made me smile with excitement. I said my goodbyes and followed Principal Rodriguez to her office.

I made it to the office, but my mom’s face didn’t please me. She didn't seem angry, but she rushed me to her car. The hip-hop music didn’t play, as it usually did. Instead, it was A.M. radio, speaking confirmation that the second tower of the World Trade Center has indeed been struck down. I couldn't appreciate how this event would change America for many years still to come. All I was concerned with was that Cartoon Network wasn't playing any of my favorite shows. Instead, like every other channel, it was covering the news.

But something else that was incredibly weird, at least to me, was the next week or two that followed. Because everyone around me in the city of Paterson, N.J. was behaving... quite nicely to us. Doors were held open, hugs were shared, and smiles were exchanged. In this moment of great tragedy, we found our humanity. I had been raised in Paterson for my entire life at this point, and never in my six years had I been surrounded by such compassion.

Sure enough, the yellow-fever of kind acts quickly faded. I always wondered if I would see people being that nice ever again.

Almost a decade and a half later, in almost the exact same fashion, my dream would come to pass. With the price of death, I have had the pleasure of seeing two unlikely factions uniting and standing arm in arm, brother to brother. Late in the month of April, rival gangs the Bloods and Crips made a treaty with one another in hopes of bringing about a “common good" after the red and blue gangs were both hit hard by the death of Baltimore native, Freddie Gray. Gray, a 25-year-old African American, had slipped into a coma and later died as a result of police brutality. This wasn’t the first time that a Black life had fallen in the arms of the people who are supposed to protect us, nor would it be the last. Freddie Gray was aggressively handled, but, I do know that he died as a result of severe spinal cord injuries. In police custody.

I did not personally know Freddie Gray, but I mourned him. This man was tired of seeing one Black life after another slip away, day after day. He decided to take a stand. And as a result, his life was taken. But it is in his death, like in the deaths of the 2,977 victims of the September 11th bombings, that we as a people are able to grow. The Bloods and Crips have a notoriously long and bitter rivalry that spans across the entire country, but even in their spite, they managed to come together and set aside their differences for the good of their land.

I wonder, can we learn from the Bloods and Crips? Can we put aside our differences and, as cliche as it sounds, get along? Time will tell.