It appears we are deluged with hokey movies and news broadcasts meant to make us imagine absolutely nothing is going to drive us to an actual “2012” scenario. Godzilla will appear but will be vanquished by Mothra. In “2012,” the characters make it to the ships and life goes on exactly as before with a few less aggravating people to pollute the earth.

I suspect Lindsay Lohan still will recklessly drive, dope herself up to the eyeballs and wear risqué clothes to court. Ultimately, she will become the darling actress again and eventually die of an overdose. But by that time we won’t remember her, because we will be watching Justin Bieber’s career spiral into oblivion.

There appears to be only the “Now;” what is to come is nowhere on the horizon. No one thinks about retirement because the younger generation talks of never being able to stop working because there just won’t be enough money to actually stop and smell the roses. The roses will be far too expensive anyway and perhaps by 2050 those roses will cease to exist because of global warming or some disaster that strikes us like “The Day After Tomorrow.”

When I started this piece, I hadn’t written anything since last November. I was stuck in the Now. Although I don’t tweet or spend any time on Facebook, I knew I had become one of those people who live only for the moment. I have papers to read and classes to teach, but I have no idea for what I would like to plan or imagine after that.

I wake up, get to campus, arrange the elements of my day and efficiently get my tasks done. That sounds great! I am a good worker bee and that should be enough, shouldn’t it? Or is there something missing in how I am approaching my everyday activities.

Shouldn’t I contemplate what our attitude toward Lohan says about us and how we want to experience her notoriety and wild lifestyle? We condone everything she does because that is our idea of Now. If she finally does crash and burn, there will be a thousand others to take her place.

We already cast aside Paris Hilton. Paris who? The future does not exist. It only is our imagination. History and the past are being rewritten on a daily basis and therefore have no tangible existence either. All that seems to be left to people is Now.

Where does that put us? It places us at a veritable crossroad, a place where we can continue to view the world around us as a landscape where only the Now exists, or we can start to make viable decisions about where all this is headed.

I think perhaps we should look at a time in history where another group of people who were once the rulers of the known universe brought alien groups from their outermost borders to do the work they did not want to do. A ruling nation that thought that it could tell the whole world how to act, while at the same time overtaxing the people, letting the roads go to ruin and finally finding the barbarians on its doorstep. Rome crumbled from within because it focused on the Now. Life seemed to be good until it was too late.

Iraq will be over soon; Afghanistan will be resolved; Libya will not require any further action by the U.S.

Good responses for the Now, but what about the future?

Craig Gunn is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at gunn@egr.msu.edu.