“Which sub is that? said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one’s salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.” George Orwell

They will Rise. As I close my eyes to enter the darkness , the whirring begins. The coldness of Bunny is comforting against my head, but there is something stirring within him. I am shaken to consciousness as I feel the hands that created him, mangled, bloody, reaching out for my awareness. I close my eyes once again and see row after row of stuffed bunnies, marching in formation, reaching for the sun as blood drips down upon them. They are marching towards a rainbow, the only color in this blackness, I scream out them to turn back! The whirring stops as a shadow appears walking across the rainbow. As I succumb to the darkness the claw never comes tinkering into my head, and The Colonel never appears, the approaching shadow is lighting its own way down the rainbow. Its footsteps are trailing blood, in his shadow I see his eyes slowly open. They shine a light that I have never seen in this world. The bunnies become animated with the pulse of life as tears of joy fall from their eyes. The whirring begins but they continue on unfazed. they feel the claws reaching out for them, but they are focused on those eyes of light walking down the rainbow. As the claws attempt to tinker inside them, their laughter pushes the claws away. The Colonel stomps the ground behind them as they all fall to the ground in a roar of laughter. The man walking down the rainbow in a trail of blood tips his hat and without a word leaving his lips, communicates, They Will Rise

…the orange, red, and yellow leaves float in the air twisting around and around, landing at my feet and floating away down the creek. I just wanted to disappear until I looked into your eyes for the first time, your dying, burning eyes. When I reached down to feel my pain they still looked at me as if the fault was all my own. I looked in the mirror and couldn’t see anything I recognized. The voices in the night as I picked up the phone reminded me I am nothing. The way my parents looked at me reminded me I am just a ghost now. Once the shaking began, it never stopped, flowing along with the creek and the oscillating trees. As your hand touched mine, the noise within my mind ceased and I remembered the beat I was following and could once again hear it as the whirring subsided. Maybe we found what it meant to be free, and what it meant to be heard. There was still always that darkness following not far behind, but as long as we could still hear the song, those claws, the whirring, those rainbows dripping blood down into our eyes, they just seemed so childish here.

“The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.” Julian Assange