A new year and fresh beginnings for America, Obama and the rest of us.

An auspicious year is upon us all and I hope that the astrologers of India and China are correct when they predict that Obama’s qualities of ‘leadership, happiness and success’ will extend to the people of the world.

I’m with Paul Sullivan on this one: “They had me at Aretha.” I was glued to my TV screen with a sense of wonder and amazement that kept my cynicism at bay. Yesterday’s news that transparency would be one of the touchstones of Obama’s presidency helped me hold onto the helium of hope and I fell into a sort of daydream about the future of media and communications … I call it:

I Have a Daydream

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a daydream. It is a daydream deeply rooted in my impossible hope for the future of humanity.

I have a daydream that one day the people of the world will rise up and demand to be spoken to with sincerity, in plain language, about things that matter to them.

I have a daydream that one day people will refuse to be spoken to as though they were a faceless mass and that people in positions of power and authority will not underestimate the intelligence of their publics.

I have a daydream that one day on the grey streets of Toronto the daughters of former journalists and the daughters of former communications professionals will be able to sit down together at the kitchen table of sisterhood.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Making transparency a national and global concern is about as good as it gets. I can’t ignore my impulse to imagine a world where we – governments and citizens, journalists and flacks – value dialogue and communication above dogma and the status quo.

It’s too bad for the Chinese people that their government doesn’t share my vision of the future. (You knew that was coming, right?)

Note: A daydream, according to Jeff Warren’s book The Head Trip is something that psychologists prefer to call ‘Task Unrelated Thought’ – “defined by one recent researcher as a state in which ‘conscious awareness is to some extent decoupled from the current situation.’”