The FB posts about being "approached" in stores and parking lots by threatening strangers have not only continued but gained momentum. Utopia is apparently experiencing a veritable epidemic of thwarted kidnappings and assaults. The new trope is "foreign" people in parking lots begging by showing women index cards claiming that they need money to feed their kids. FB mom response: Call the police! Pack heat! (Virginia is an open-carry state.) Maybe run them over with your car!
I now feel like I am living in some kind of alternate dimension or a low-key mass hysteria where everyone has claimed to have personally seen the Abominable Snowman or something and now they are working up a serious plan to trap him and interrogate him.
In order to make sense of my altered reality, I have come up with the following theory: Having previously lived in cities where begging and panhandling, including occasionally aggressive and in-your-face variants, are common, I no longer feel that being approached by strangers constitutes a major violation of my personal space or of decent behavior. I don't like being asked for money, but I'm used to it. But many people here in Utopia have grown up in rural and small-town settings where begging and panhandling is very uncommon, and so they are more sensitive to it as a serious and potentially threatening indecency. So what appears to my desensitized self as an extreme overreaction is to them a reasonable response to an unknown threat.
I noticed shortly after we moved here that people here who grew up here (as opposed to the more urban-raised transplants) have what seems to me to be a disproportionate need for privacy. They think homes need to be on big lots (or preferably on acres) so that no one can get into their business. I find their ideal of a 1500-sq ft bungalow on five acres up on a mountain to be sort of comical, like were Peeping Toms ever such a big problem that they had to retreat to the wilderness to live with bears for neighbors to fend them off? Not just apartment buildings offend them, but the kinds of close-set single-family homes that developers now build everywhere (including in the middle of nowhere) in the name of "walkability." How could you stand your neighbors always watching you through your windows?
So I conclude that the parking lot paranoia is just another manifestation of this country/city divide in expectations about privacy and personal space. Plausible?