Annals of Modern Parental Paranoia
Ever get the feeling that today's yuppie parents worry too much? I do.
In Montgomery County, Maryland, a hoity-toity collection of D.C. suburbs, parents recently started freaking out about a man in a white van who was stalking their young children. Phones began ringing off hooks; Internet bulletin boards were buzzing.
"Please be advised that a man in a white panel van approached one of our 13-year-old girls this morning as she walked to practice," someone wrote in one of the unsigned e-mails. "The man tried unsuccessfully to engage the girl in conversation. She wisely ignored the man.""The driver of the van in both cases was a white male, about 50 years old. He had light brown hair with a receding hairline. He was disheveled looking, wearing a white t-shirt. The van was old and looked like a van that a painter would drive."
Classic tropes of the child molester. He looks like a member of a lower economic class, but someone whom
we invite into our home as part of the service class. He looks like a loser—badly dressed, slightly overweight, bad hair. He drives a crummy but generic car. Of course he does; we've seen all this in movies and on television.
Except it's not true. The Washington Post reports that the whole scare came after "a man in a white van stopped a 13-year-old girl in the parking lot of a Potomac swimming pool.
"'Miss, I think you left your lights on,' the man reportedly said, according to police, who tracked down the teenager yesterday. The man then drove away."
And so an act of thoughtfulness is transformed into a modern-day witch hunt. Which says something, I think, about the underlying sense that people living in upscale commuter suburbs have of being disconnected to their town, of a lack of community that creates a social and psychological vacuum...into which a sinister man in a white van can drive, taking aim at the children, underscoring the artificiality of our modern lives.
