America has a new hero, or should have.
He is David Brown, the Dallas police chief who has set an incredible example of calm, open leadership in the worst of circumstances.
He is burying four of his own officers and another from a separate police agency this week, while leading a city police department that found itself under siege last week from a demented assailant.
There is no real explanation for what happened in downtown Dallas when a skilled gunman opened fire on the police there, killing the five officers and injuring others, including two civilians.
That story and the ones of shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota that triggered nationwide demonstrations, including the peaceful one in Dallas that preceded the murders there, have so dominated the news cycles in the past week that Chief Brown necessarily found himself in an intense public spotlight.
It shouldn't matter that his skin is black but it helps in this environment where racial motivation is so much a part of the discussion.
It was a black man who gunned down the officers in the streets of Dallas, saying later that he wanted to kill white people, particularly white officers. All of it came in the wake of the deaths of two black men in separate encounters with police in Louisiana and Minnesota.
"I've been black a long time, so it's not much of a bridge for me," said Brown of this increasingly pronounced gap between black and blue. He understands it first hand and is able to make others understand.
The 55-year-old veteran officer, whose first police assignment was in the Dallas neighborhood where he grew up, talked a lot about the positive policing changes achieved in the city since his youth.
What the chief showed the nation is a man who loves his work, believes in service and expects much from the police who serve his native Dallas.
His department had been held up as exemplary in its application of community policing and indeed demonstrated the same as a Black Lives Matter demonstration took place in Dallas.
City officers were there to protect the free speech of assembled demonstrators. They weren't outfitted as combatants but were there to safeguard the Dallas people, those demonstrating and those going about their usual lives on that fateful day. When shots rang out, those officers stepped up their protection, running toward the gunfire or shielding citizens with their own bodies.
The whole story isn't known yet, of course. The investigation continues and will until every speck of evidence from the crime scene and from the body cameras worn by officers is reviewed.
What is known now is that Brown, admittedly exhausted but persuaded that transparency is the best policy, has repeatedly stood before the local and national press corps, answering all reasonable questions. He was the calm in the storm in Dallas.
In other cities where demonstrators gathered, tempers flared, sometimes resulting in crowd violence against officers, many of whom dressed in riot gear as the gap between black and blue seemed to widen. Questions linger about who instigated the clashes in some of those places, including the cities where black men died recently at police hands.
Racial strife is real and calls are being issued now for people of the different races to imagine themselves in the other's place.
Chief Brown has bared his own feelings as he asked the people of Dallas to let the police know they are appreciated in this awful aftermath.
Yet he also called on those in his profession to "do things right" and put their careers on the line if need be to solve the nagging problems that exist between some police and the people they serve.
It's only the beginning of a renewed conversation in this country about race, policing and much more.
Many issues are tied up in this crisis, including the proliferation of guns and the wariness of police officers that the people they encounter may be carrying lethal weapons.
It will fall to the David Browns among us to lead us away from the violence that so shatters the nation.
Commentary on 07/13/2016