Atomic Cookers

When I was a teenager microwave ovens appeared.  My grandmother called them "Atomic Cookers" and her word sounded dangerous.  We were all worried about the atomic bomb when I was young.  I was convinced it's the way we would all die soon.  They talked about it in school all the time and for some reason we were all more afraid of the "bomb" threat then any other form of destruction.

As I was heating up my breakfast this morning, I thought about the microwave oven.  How exactly does it work?  I have no idea.  I put the food in it comes out hot in a fraction of the time it takes to cook it on the stove or heat it in an oven.  It's just this little miracle box that does what it does faster and more efficiently.  In the back of my mind I'm wondering how I could be so trusting of something I don't understand.  We do that a lot don't we?  We find out down the road that something causes cancer when everyone has been doing it for ions.  No one thought to think it through?  

Like the sheep we are, we follow the fads.  Do what everyone else does, and live our lives trusting technology that might just be more dangerous than the atomic bomb itself.  It must be safe if everyone is doing it.  Right?

Taryn was someone who would think outside the box.  She asked the hard questions sometimes.  Questions I didn't know how to answer.  She was fiercely independent in some ways and in others she followed the crowd.  I think most of us are a mixture of both attitudes.  I know I do some things, like use my microwave, without really thinking about it.   I do other things, like what I'm doing now, writing my thoughts out in a blog, that are unusual and brave.  Different.

I heard a story once about ants.  They follow each other. If you put a trail of them around the rim of a flower pot they'll follow each other until they die.  Not one of them will break out and take a chance on a different route, even when they're exhausted and dying.  It must feel dangerous to them to break free from the crowd and be different.  It's brave to be different.  It might just save our lives if we are.  

I still use my microwave.  I've been doing it for 45 years and I'm still here.  I didn't stand in front of it when I was pregnant and that advice made me raise an eyebrow too.  What if I'm NOT pregnant?  Is it okay to microwave yourself if you're not carrying a baby then?  Do the waves come out of the thing?  That's frightening.  Will I cook myself if I stand too close???  But just like all the other dangers we juggle in our lives this is just one more right?

Or is being different and asking the hard questions, the real danger?