Hey, remember that playground gorilla statue that everyone freaked out about when some folks suggested it was kind of racist?
Well, the town repainted it to look less minstrely and reinstalled it and everything's okay now. 
It's a useful reminder that "people object to a thing, other people respond to their objection, situation gets resolved" is a story that happens all day every day all around us.
And you know, it doesn't even matter whether the original objections were objectively meritorious. The paint job on the gorilla made some people sad and angry, so the town changed it so they wouldn't be sad and angry anymore.
That's how community works. That's how empathy works. That's what it is to be a person existing in society.
Unlike the thousands of people on social media who fulminated against those objections as a horror and an outrage, the town—a small, white, conservative Texas town—just . . . addressed them.
We usually miss the second chapter of these viral stories, but in my experience they end like this pretty often—with people coming together beyond the reach of the internet yammerers to be quietly decent to each other.
I think a lot about how much easier it is to break things than to build things. It's good to be reminded how often people choose to build things despite that.
One more thing about this story: A huge number of people online assumed that locals had objected to the statue because they thought gorillas were per se racist. That assumption was false.
A big chunk of the internet outrage at the PC liberals of Corsicana Texas was based on a lazy, inaccurate guess as to what was actually going on on the ground.
And this, again, is something I see all the time—the national media and the internet get their teeth into a small local story, and turn it into something it's demonstrably not.
The people of places like Corsicana aren't really real to most of us. We don't know them, we'll never meet them, and honestly we don't care much about them. They wander into our line of sight, we yell about them for a while, and then we forget them.
If you've got a big platform—in traditional media or online—think twice before unleashing your outrage about some random anonymous stranger because of a news story you stumbled across.
We're getting pretty good, collectively, at remembering that early reports about mass shootings and terrorist attacks are usually wrong in major ways, but we rarely apply that knowledge to stories about local community disputes and campus protests.
I try to be careful about this stuff myself (and I did enough digging on the playground gorilla story that I got it right at the time when a lot of people were getting it wrong), but I'm not immune either. I know I've screwed up, and I'm sure I've screwed up without knowing it.
I bet the Corsicana mayor had a real lousy week back in early March, and I'm so glad that the people who complained about the statue had their anonymity protected. This stuff can jump the rails so quickly.
Anyway. Yay for the good people of Corsicana, yay for constructive resolution of potentially incendiary disputes, and yay for Dobby the no-longer-racist gorilla.
