It is one of those phrases that implies ambiguity, prediction of the future … but those implications seem rather to be a sore misinterpretation. It is more a celebration of the present, an acknowledgment that change has come and the past truly is, in the past. We’ve entered the Now and all that brings with it.
Flipping through channels the other day I stopped on SONY entertainment channel to watch The Godfather II (my favourite of the must-have trilogy) and it was wonderfully refreshing and incredibly amusing to notice the corner age-restriction R18. Does such a restriction even exist any longer? The last movie I recall as possibly having that restriction is Natural Born Killers if that. But here on the SONY channel, suave Robert de Niro and an endearingly young Al Pacino are R18. One has to wonder though, is that ridiculous over-conservatism or have we become ridiculously uncensored in terms of what is socially acceptable, not just for adults, but more importantly for children. What age is now socially acceptable to rape children of their innocence?
I find myself currently in a ‘nothing phases me’ sort of state. Not a superwoman complex state however, but blasé, almost déjà vu, ‘yes that’s life’ shrug my shoulders complacency. And that’s not great! I recall reviews years ago about the movie City of God about the favelas of Rio .It took me very long to actually sit down and watch it though, which I only succeeded in doing a few weeks ago, and to say the least, I expected more, more drama, more disturbance, more shock-factor. What is wrong with me that the last movie I watched that crept under my skin was Hotel Rwanda, and this documentary not fictional movie of what is really happening makes me shrug my shoulders, raise my eyebrows and respond with a “hectic”, that’s all. No, no, I’m not saying the poverty, the violent resourcefulness of children does not affect me, I’m saying I’ve become immune to a degree. Yes, I’d like to idealistically believe it’s a defense mechanism to remove me emotionally from the horrors of this world that I feel so helpless to change, but once the thick-skin has settled on, does it really matter how it got to be there? It’s there, and it is entering me into oblivion.
For now, I’m detached in a way that I never used to be. No, I do not crave to be emotionally destroyed by everything around me, but I want to understand how it came to be that I almost care less, almost. Before, I was helpless, yet affected, change isn’t always good. So for now, I resolve to find a better solution than building walls, slicing off the pieces because I don’t like their fit and complacently accepting that innocence is lost. I am relieved that I still cannot watch a Pussycat Dolls music video without cringing and feeling like I am watching soft porn. There is an art to selfishness, a role of the independent in social responsibility. We are individual only to be separate pieces that fit into a whole, so perhaps our complacency can become something of the past and for now, we stop shrugging our shoulders because we are not directly affected, for now…change is come again.
Sure we’d all like to use “For now” as a hopeful implication of what is yet to come…but we’d probably have a better conscious understanding if we saw it as two words linking the past to present and leaving the future where it is meant to be…yet to come. When my brother was little, his animated lion hero was SImba, from The Lion King. For now, my nephews fluffy lions are named Alex, after the lion from Madagascar…
