Happy New Year. War will be over.

Everything would be silent but I hear the noise now. The grumbling that predominated the past year has broken through the first layer of Earth as I hear the trumpets begin to play. They mark the ascension of some joyous finale, or maybe it is some epic war.

And so lie the images, scattered in the low-hanging sky like stretched-out clouds of mist. Images of a leader gunned down in the desert by a fanatic, the first shot of the great revolutions occurring in another, far off desert in the Middle East, where the masses stood up and destroyed any resistance to some form of democracy, of which they had only long heard and never experienced.

But would they be free in the end? For what is freedom? We talk so much of it and toss it around in our modern discourse like a stuffed animal, but who is free? Are we? In the United States of America, are we free? Did the masses that gathered on the streets of New York City, months after the Arab revolutions, seek some kind of freedom?

And even when there is no ruling class governing a people, either through force or by disenfranchisement and propaganda, will the people ever truly be free?

I wonder whether any society has even begun to grasp the meaning of the word, and its awesome potential. One that transcends the illusion fostered by the long standing pillars of government, politics and religion.

Yet I am overcome with a feeling that these pillars cannot stand forever, not as we grow more aware of our potential as a society over that of those who govern, not as we begin to study the power of the mind and of the human spirit over that of any preacher, temple or centuries-old scripture.

I hear the trumpets sound from below. It starts in soft. To the tune of a Happy New Year.