By Brendan Ulmer
Ulmer Uninterrupted
One time, for our anniversary, my fiancée and I decided to spend the day at the Sedgwick County Zoo.
It was a genuinely lovely way to spend our special day. The weather was nice, the animals were out, and the Dippin’ Dots were delicious.
About halfway through the day, we visited the gorilla exhibit.
Seeking escape from the sunlight, the gorillas rested against the exhibit windows in the shade.
Separated by a one-inch layer of glass, you could see their every detail. The skin beneath their fur, the fine grooves on their hands and fingertips, and a gaze that could fool you into thinking you were making eye contact with another human.
They were breathtaking, genuinely breathtaking.
I turned to my fiancée and said, “They really are just like us.”
Then, as if he had heard me, the gorilla right in front of us reached under his friend’s butt, grabbed a handful of feces, and started slowly chowing down on it.
Sometimes, this is how it feels to be on the Hutch Gossip Facebook group.
One second, you’re admiring the neighborly, helpful nature of your fellow Hutchinson resident. The next, you witness something so gross, ignorant, or perplexing that you’re left wondering what even led to it.
If you don’t know what Hutch Gossip is, congratulations on living a better, more complete life than I. I should be more like you, but until then, Hutch Gossip is a forum for people who have any sort of familiarity with Hutchinson to talk about, basically, whatever they want.
The name suggests it’s primarily to be used for gossip, but there’s all sorts of stuff on there.
I joined the group about a month ago, mostly for professional purposes. If something big was going on in town, and I hadn’t heard about it, I figured the gossip page could give me a good place to start from.
However, to this point, I haven’t been able to use anything that I’ve learned from there.
A lot of what ends up there are random requests for advice or services, “Whose dog is this?” posts, and extremely vague complaints about local government corruption.
It. Is. Awesome.
Kind of.
My favorite kind of Hutch Gossip post is the advice request that is deeply revealing about the person who posted it. For instance, let me make up the kind of post that you might see on Hutch Gossip, maybe even later today: “Are there any local divorce lawyers who accept Bitcoin?” See what I mean? You can learn so much about someone just from one sentence.
Hutch Gossip and many of the conversations therein really make the case that there is a strong need for better civic education in the community.
Hopefully, we can help with that here at The Tribune.
The truth of the matter is, even with the size of Hutch Gossip, 26.7 k users at the time of writing this, it is actually a very small number of them constantly sharing their opinions. It is not reflective of real life even a little, even if it feels like it’s what we’re being inundated with constantly.
That being said. For the couple of dozen people in the group who are extremely sure that Hutchinson’s city government is deeply and irreparably corrupt, by all means, send your evidence to my email: brendan@hutchtribune.com. If this is as big and obvious as you say it is, I’m going to feel really dumb for not having found it myself.
Brendan Ulmer is a reporter with The Hutchinson Tribune. He may be reached at brendan@hutchtribune.com.