Courage to Be: Revisited

From The Dallas Morning News

So now you tell us. In 2003, Bill Burr wrote the rules for password security for the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, urging computer users to change passwords every 90 days and create such intricate passwords that even the world’s fastest supercomputer would overheat trying to decipher them.

Burr, however, recently confessed to The Wall Street Journal that this digital keyboard dance has caused endless frustration among us, the computer-using masses, in the name of online security. He is among a chorus of security experts who now say that a simple natural language sentence, for example, “It is a lovely day in Spain,” is a better password than the tortured, numbers-lettersand-wingdings combinations we are all burdened with remembering. “The truth is, it was barking up the wrong tree,” he says. Well, what do you know? Unfortunately, his mea culpa comes a bit too late for us. We’ve wasted years of our lives changing passwords, not because we’re security freaks, but mostly because we can’t remember those impossible combinations of numbers, upper and lower case letters, special characters and symbols. Humanity, says computer expert Cormac Herley, a researcher at Microsoft, spends the equivalent of 1,300 years each day typing in passwords. Holy cow! And we thought YouTube surfing for cat videos was a time suck.

Password security is important, given the many high-profile corporate and social media hacks of supposedly secure computer networks, and complex combinations can be effective deterrents. But the trade-off is between passwords that are easy for others to guess and passwords that are impossible for us to remember. And when we can’t remember, we tend to do stupid things, like writing complex passwords on sticky notes on our computer monitors or on paper tucked beneath our mouse pads. And as ingenious as we think we are, switching numbers for words (“Good4you”) or adding another number (“Good4you2), isn’t always a security improvement, either.

If it seems like we are always fighting the last war, we are. A password that would have taken more than three years to crack in 2000 might have taken about a year to crack in 2004. Five years later, the same password could be broken in just four months, and now it could be decoded in a matter of weeks. But how could Burr have known that he would be responsible for so much global cussing and frustration for so little security in return? Back then, scant research existed on passwords; mindnumbing sequences seemed like the best solution.

Experts predict that passwords as we know them will eventually give way to biometrics like fingerprint sensors and face recognition technologies found on some smartphones and consumer products. And who knows what after that? From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The combination of North Korea’s augmenting nuclear weapons capacity and threats against United States and the region, plus America’s own unclear policy toward what is happening — including President Donald Trump’s threats of an unprecedented level of “fire and fury” — is becoming disturbing to Americans in their normal August torpor.

There is increasing evidence that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is making progress toward its goal of building a small enough nuclear warhead that can be mounted on an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach from its territory to some U.S. base or property in the region, Guam or even Alaska. North Korea’s spokespersons, including leader Kim Jong Un, are heralding its progress toward that goal, and perhaps also claiming progress it has not yet made.

On the American side, there is the position of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, supported by the senior leaders of the Department of Defense who realize fully the military implications of a U.S. attack on the DPRK, that talk with North Korea is what is needed. There is also the position of Trump, who threatened Tuesday in unscripted remarks that any further North Korean threats “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Anyone ever involved in a serious exchange with another country — as, for example, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Russians — should understand that when it comes to matters as critical to the future of mankind as the possibility of nuclear war, there is no advantage nor room to create confusion on the other side as to one’s position.

It is worth a good look at the map to keep the North Korean issue in perspective. The DPRK is sandwiched on a peninsula between roaring “Western” economic success South Korea, which also hosts U.S. troops and heavy military hardware, and China, the world’s second-largest economic power, also armed with nuclear weapons. Japan is nearby and Russia even has a short border with North Korea.

It is also important to remember that the United States has both substantial, probably effective defenses against attack and probably the capacity to mess up North Korea’s missile launch codes.

A unilateral U.S. attack on North Korea should be out of the question, given the literally incalculable casualties that would result. U.S. policy should have been for years to talk with the North Koreans. Attempts to isolate countries like Cuba, Syria and the DPRK have got us nowhere in terms not only of world peace, but also in bringing about change in their policies.

Talking with North Korea is, of course, like trying to pick up an enraged porcupine. But the alternative — war — just cannot be, and threatening them with it is only to enhance the risks of just that.

Imiss living in the home of the brave; we Americans have become a fearful people. The news media on both sides of the political spectrum floods us with sensational scary stories so they can grow an audience to view ads for medicines. Politicians play to fears to win votes. It seems that a significant number of Americans are especially frightened by potential terrorist attacks and by people who don’t look, talk or believe like one of their particular tribe.

Without doubt, we live with many threatening events and issues. Lightning-fast change overwhelms us. Yet, change was built into creation on day one and there have always been threatening events and issues. We baby boomers were teens waiting for nuclear missiles to launch from Cuba. Of course, we need to be vigilant about terrorism, but that does not mean we should see a suicide bomber in every unusually-dressed person at the airport. Crime is a reality — but so are compassion and neighborliness when we seize an opportunity to develop new relationships rather than retreat into suspicion.

During the early 1950’s Sen. Joe McCarthy was on his Communist witch hunt, and the Cold War fear of Russian H-bombs dominated much of the public’s attention. Into that setting, the theologian Paul Tillich wrote his classic book “The Courage to Be.” Tillich recognizes the fears and anxieties that come with being human and offers courage as the best way to deal with those fears. I believe we live in similar times, and that we need to choose courage as the way we meet threats both real and imagined.

The courage that Tillich offers is not the courage of first responders or brave soldiers in battle. It is not the heroism of a bystander who rushes to save a life in an accident or a natural disaster. Tillich’s courage is that of viewing a fearful life situation, recognizing that one is scared, but then moving into the situation despite the threat. The courageous are not without fear, but they refuse to let fear rule their life.

Crippling fears may be as immediate as social embarrassment or as unimpressive as traveling to a distant land where language and customs are different. Friends from two different states who participated in a pilgrimage to Spain described very similar questions as they prepared in their home towns: “Aren’t you afraid?” I recently returned from a week-long retreat at a ranch in Wyoming; my level of anxiety grew the closer I came to the event. Had either my friends or I let fear control our decisions, we would have stayed comfortably at home and would have missed an experience to be remembered for a lifetime.

Making a case for courage to travel is hardly earth-shattering. Much more important is to make a case for courage in two of the most important and most controversial aspects of our lives — culture and faith.

Culture is our everyday, taken for granted, comfort zone. It is the values and ways of thinking and being that we have inherited from our families, our friends, our churches, our community. Culture is tradition. Our culture is powerfully influenced by the institutions that provide stability and by history that offers us models for what makes us either good or bad citizens. As rapid change and information overload have stressed our national culture, we have increasingly retreated into smaller, more tribe-like groupings to find our security and comfort.

It takes courage to believe that cultural change is not an attack. It takes courage to consider the stranger crowding us at the stadium as just another friendly fan rather than a threat. It takes courage to trust that our Constitution and our political institutions are strong enough to weather the storms of partisan meanness and gridlock. It takes courage to believe that diversity makes America great by making our culture stronger and more resilient, rather than making it weaker.

Those of us who actively participate in religious life use the term faith frequently and easily. In the Bible, the best known stories of great faith are also stories of great courage. In the Old Testament, Abraham left his home country to follow God; Moses and the Israelites escaped Egypt; Joshua led the Israelites into battle against bigger and stronger enemies. Faith called these and other great leaders into an unknown future. Faithfulness required of them a great courage. In the New Testament, the stories of Jesus, of those he healed, and of those who followed him during and after his earthly ministry, are filled with courageous faith.

In our day, it still takes courage to be people of faith. A fearful faith cannot ask questions, is frightened by new ideas and cannot consider that expressions of faith other than “old time religion” might be of God. A faith based in courage seeks to grow deeper; one based in fear clings too fiercely to the security of unquestioned traditions. Courageous faith allows one to keep an open heart and an open mind, and tries to distinguish God’s commands from the traditions of culture or the dictates of political beliefs. Sadly, history is not kind in reviewing how well Christian people have been able to make those distinctions.

It is no small matter to call for courage in the face of fear. It is, however, a far better response than avoidance, withdrawal, and retreat into a fortress mentality. If we act in courage, we have the opportunity to write a new chapter in the history of our country and of our religious faith. REV. GARY BATCHELOR