controversy is good, especially if change comes out of it.
You can look at a lot of controversy as "Oh shit, everything is going to hell!"
or you could look at it like "look at all these problems that people are finally working on"
With the police thing, yea riots are bad, but at least its bringing up a rising issue, its not like the police were only abusing their power now and not before hand, so this outcry will hopefully lead to regulations that fix these issues.
with gamergate its simply people standing up and saying you shouldn't have any right to censor art.
every once in a while an old issue will come back, but you can look at it as a reminder of why we have these laws and things in place to start off, then its not all bad. I mean yea its horrible and sad that the Anti-vaccers are going to end up killing a lot of kids, but for most people we have never seen diseases because of vaccines, so its harder to understand the horrors of these things. Yea I hate that they have to bring their kids, but as long as we learn from it maybe more lives in the future will be saved.
Science and reason will continue to march forward and people will get left behind, what matters is that we don't has a society reject the wonderful things that science, knowledge, and reason can give us.
Whenever you have large sweeping changes or problems there are going to be bumps, thats how society works.