Growing up, my step-dad was a banker. And a pretty good one at that.

The man had three offices in two states and put miles on his white Toyota Camry like nobody’s business. He changed the oil in that car once a month, though I’m not sure if that’s because of the miles he put on it or because he obsessed over keeping it in tip-top shape.

Either way, he worked all the time and he was very good at what he did.

One thing I remember throughout my childhood and teen years was sitting down at the dinner table as a family. We’d each talk about how our days went for a bit. And every once in a while my step-dad would complain about a client who lied or forgot something related to his or her own personal finances.

Those mistakes, honest or otherwise, meant everything had to be redrafted and the purchase or sale had to be reevaluated.

He’d always get frustrated knowing that someone was likely wheeling and dealing to get themselves into a sweet property investment that they probably shouldn’t be.

He mentioned with regularity that that type of greed was going to bite everyone in the butt in the end.

I think I remember those conversations not because I necessarily cared about the mortgage situation in America as a kid, but I think I remember it because church leaders incessantly talked about staying out of debt and saving money. And, although the recession hit in December 2007, my family didn’t have the mental capacity to think about it until my step-dad was buried in March of 2008.

But ultimately, he was right. He saw enough people willing to lie their way into a big house and enough bankers willing to forgive those lies to issue a larger mortgage. He saw everything coming from a mile away.

Ultimately, his hunch was based on the greed he saw among the clients he met and the professionals he worked with. That greed caused a massive housing collapse that triggered a series of economic events across the country and throughout the world.

You could argue that the recession was caused by poor housing regulations, questionable loans, or something else, but all of that boils down to greed. Some people wanted house, other people wanted to collect interest and others wanted to see housing numbers go up.

A lot of people were greedy, and that greediness bit us all in the butt eventually.

Now we’re living in the midst of a global pandemic and massive racial protests.

As if the election itself wasn’t bad enough.

But these things didn’t spring up out of nowhere. Neither did the problems associated with them.

These events are happening due to decades, if not generations, of inequality, an unwillingness to innovate, greed, an unrelenting “us vs them” mentality, and an unwillingness to reconcile our past mistakes.

These events are America’s chickens coming home to roost.

We can deny that racial inequality exists all day long. We can pretend as if the pandemic has ended and we should just plug our proverbial ears with our fingers and reopen the economy. But that doesn’t change the fact that, at the end of the day, we’re where we’re at, because we’ve been consistently greedy, uncharitable, exclusionary, and unwilling to own those flaws.

I use the word “we” on purpose.

Because in the end, an individual may hold bad ideas, but a society’s ideals are held collectively.

Which means I need to take ownership for my contributions just as much as anyone else.

There’s a lot of people who want to tear down a lot of institutions that we’ve built and rebuild them from the ground up. In some cases that’s probably a good thing. Healthcare is still a major pain point for so many people. And the pandemic has exposed a major flaw in employer-provided healthcare.

Poor policing has been exposed in a big way, and those institutions need to be reformed in some way as well.

Now’s the time to tear down everything that represents the failed mistakes of our collective past and rebuild new institutions that represent who we want to be in the future.

From things as large as racial inequality to things as small as walkable towns and accessible buildings, I think our country, and our state is primed to make some big changes so long as we don’t stick our heads in the sand and pretend like we don’t see the chaos around us.

But to do that, we have to admit fault. We have to own our collective mistakes. Own our greed, our discrimination, our poor justifications and everything else.

You can’t build a better car engine until you recognize what was wrong with the previous model.

And you can’t build a better mortgage process, until you recognize the flaws in the last one.

Ultimately I don’t think the pandemic broke America. And the protests did not cause a bad citizen-police relationship.

These things merely exposed the cracks in the foundation that have been there a while.

And now that we know they’re there we have the choice: rebuild or pretend we still don’t see them.