Backstory of Meter Incidents?

Yesterday in Hutchinson another utility company employee was held at gunpoint by a resident, after the employee had installed a new meter on the resident's property.  I wrote earlier that I could make no sense of a similar incident involving a person I knew.

Since then I've begun to understand some of the likely backstory in both of these incidents.  Apparently, in a "documentary" (which I have not watched) and from other sources, the word is that smart meters in use by some utility companies emit a great deal of harmful radiation and are capable of spying on residents.  They also are inaccurate and because of this consumers are charged unfairly.  They are not secure, and hackers can gather information from them. Besides that, they increase the hazard of fires and explosions.  The old meters were analog instead of digital.  A summary of the issues surrounding smart meters can be found here.

I believe that the meters being replaced in our area were analog meters being replaced by smart (digital) meters.

Obviously, most people would put the information in the documentary in the category of conspiracy theories.  My sense is that there may be a grain of truth in each of the supposed hazards, but the overall threat is vastly overblown.  For example, using a cell phone for 15 minutes a day would expose the user to more radiation than a smart meter would in a day.

Apparently, one of the people sounding the alarm about smart meters slept beside a bank of meters for an extended period of time and subsequently began to experience health problems.  The connection between those two facts may not have been scientifically proven, but it sounds reasonable to me on the basis of anecdotal evidence--and based on what I've read elsewhere about the physiological effects of being immersed in an electromagnetic field.  Typical residential customers, however, don't sleep right next to their meters, and there is usually only one on the property.  Both of those factors could mitigate whatever radiation danger a smart meter poses.  Everywhere I've lived has had a meter on a pole a short distance from the house.

My takeaway from thinking about all this is that I will never allow our analog meter to be replaced by a smart meter.  In fact, if any utility company employee attempts to do so, I will unzip Hiromi's over/under shotgun from its padded case and accompany my deprecations in the employee's direction by brandishing the shotgun.  Just kidding.

My real takeaway is that the hostilities we've seen locally of late are likely fear-based.  The fear is rooted in believing alarming messages about sinister forces operating around us.  To summarize:  Believing the hyped-danger-rhetoric hypes the fear which hypes the hostility.

If you see in that summary a foreshadowing of the content of an upcoming post on hostility, I congratulate you on your prescience.