I’m reading The Da Vinci Code, which I never got around to
for whatever reason (I probably eschew popular books out of some intrinsic
literati-hipster tendency within me), and even though I have mixed feelings
about the book, I always get a little excited about cryptography.
The information age has not only engendered a paranoia, but
also a plethora of sensitive information that we throw around over wireless,
free for any hungry recipient to grab. Sure you can log on to your online user
account in the coffee shop, but my computer in “promiscuous mode” can also
catch every request you make to the server and, if the request isn’t carefully
encoded, peal it apart. Recently, the HeartBleed fiasco revealed a technique
for reading through a whole bunch of what should have been carefully guarded
server data, including countless numbers of users’ passwords and login
information. The first generations of cryptography were relatively simple, but
we’ve had to develop more and more elaborate systems to protect a very
different kind of information.
As happy as cryptography makes me, though, it also imbues a
certain sadness, a longing for a world where security wasn’t so requisite. A
missionary came back to our church when I was a child, and told stories about
living in rural Russia, and how he frequently had people enter into his house
in the wee hours of the morning and yell for a feast and drinks to share, and
the owners would happily oblige, even if it meant bustling about the kitchen
and waking up everyone at 2am. No one locked their doors, because community was
an axiom, and no one feared the robber or the Raskolnikov.
This sort of living always seemed beautiful to me. Matthew
and I used to always have this argument about socialism/communism where I would
say that, on the barest of levels, I admire these theories. A major problem is
a lack of motivation to work, and the required bloody revolution, but I’d
always argue that I wanted to be a communist NOT for the politics and
revolution of the proletariat, but for the root word: community. I wanted to be
a six-home communism, and, in all actuality, Amish.
Now, I don’t actually think I want to be Amish, at least not
right now. I admire the community aspects, but I think I’d miss the travel, the
motion, the technology of modernity, but there is a beauty in the close-knit
community, in the comfort of neighbors that don’t require locked doors and
hidden lives. America has cultivated this dream, this American Dream in us that
says: “you can go from zero to hero; from ashes to riches”, and be the Bill
Gates, the Gatsby, the next magnate, but I think that our media and this theory
have isolated us. By telling us of the American Dream, it has set every person against
his neighbor, against his family and friends, and marked them as stepping
stones into a higher future.
We view our God as father, mother, sister, brother, friend
precisely because our culture has stolen those concepts from our worlds.
I wish there wasn’t a reason for security because I wish
people trusted each other. Every day the news reveals stories of
shootings saying those people sitting next to you in the classroom aren’t
safe; we hear stories of break-ins and murders telling us our neighbors and
families are ever on the verge of insanity; we’re told we live in a dangerous,
scary world, and we must overcome it. I’d rather live in a beautiful world, and
together enjoy it. I decided a while back that that was my world, but the
shadows and ashes of paranoia still cling tight to my every day. I’ve got
passwords, I’ve got secrets, I’ve got layers of deceptions prepared in case my
emotional fortifications are brought to their knees.
And I think what I look for most in friendship, in people I
can love, is finding people who I can open the doors of my castle to, to whom I
don’t mind showing the unswept corridors and dusty rooms of my ugly life. Wouldn’t
it be great if this was everyone? Or if I actually didn’t have so many locked
rooms in the first place?
What if my life was a field and not a fortress, a forest with flowers instead of fortifications and fear?
What if my life was a field and not a fortress, a forest with flowers instead of fortifications and fear?
