We are badly bent people with no remedy for our twisted
condition. One thing, however, binds us—liars, whores, nuns, teachers, lawyers,
kings, peasants, starved, gluttons, accountants, businesspeople, artist—we all
look at the squalid world around us, put our hands to our faces and whisper “oh
my God.”
None deny that we’ve inherited a world sagging under the
weight of our selfishness.
At some moment in our lives we feel the terror of a parent
whose infant simply will not wake, and in that moment our helplessness to
change anything burns to the quick.
So out from the lips of rapists, fathers, mothers,
homosexuals, presidents, immigrants, addicts, priests, students, everyone, comes the
humanizing cry “oh my God.”
“Oh my God,” we say:
When a bride returns from the honeymoon with a beaten face.
When we sit in a sun-baked car.
When children matted with debris from their once-home
stumble into our living rooms, crying into our television.
When small towns, choked full of churches, pass laws making it illegal to be homeless.
When the world becomes enamored with reality
television weddings and becomes bored with warring nations.
When soldiers, unable to handle war-memories created
from serving their country, take their lives.
When a fed-up flight attendant flips off the passengers,
opens a beer and activates emergency landing.
When gas costs more than food.
When starving people kill each other for garbage.
When a New Yorker kills a three foot rat.
When millions are wasted on making commercial goods while
homes smashed by tornadoes still sit in jagged heaps for years.
When a woman feels a lump.
When the market crash strips a family of everything.
When women and children are exploited, raped, sold, bought.
When we receive the toothless smile of a freshly bathed
baby.
When we get our credit card bill.
When we smash our thumbs.
Gender, race, social status, sexual-orientation and culture
rise to the same level, stripped of their chasmizing differences when we make
the same plea.
“Oh my God.”
