If We Were Given to Considering Our Faults, Would we Spot this One?

   What if we were an introspective nation, a repentant one, a land that sought out its faults and sought to change them?
   What if we were reflective of our sins, analyzing our shortcomings?
   No, I don't so much mean our individual sins. It is the societal faults I speaks of.  Would you say racism is a fault? What then, if we reflected on it, recognized it, and decided that if this flaw existed -- if there were patterns of racism running through us -- then we must do something to change.
   What if when we saw it among ourselves, pangs of remorse grabbed at us? What if we didn't let go of it just because we, as individuals, didn't see it as our personal problem? Rather, what if we could see it as a societal problem, and we took the attitude that if it was society's problem, it was our problem, for this was our society, and what flaws it had were ours to help change?
   Now, those who know the steps of repentance, understand change doesn't come without recognition and desire to change. It doesn't come without remorse. If we, as a nation, do not feel remorseful, if we don't recognize it as a problem, it is not something we will repent of. If we suggest racism is not overly common, or if we brush it off, not wanting to discuss it, then solving it will not get done. If we let other issues take us from this one, if we don't stop long enough to work on this, we will remain a racist nation.
   Racist nation? I use the term to suggest we have some. How dominant it is should not be too much an issue. If we are serious about solving the problem, we do not wait until it reaches a certain level, we work on what we see, however much that is.
  This issue -- racism -- is not one we should shun. It is one we should own, as a society, as a people. If we do not own up to it, if we do not confess to it, so to speak, it will remain sin and flaw upon us.