One Small Step with WYSO brings strangers with different beliefs together for a conversation — not to debate politics, but to simply get to know each other.
In this episode, Hailey Clark of Dayton and Sheila Miller of Yellow Springs discuss how their Ohio roots make it easier to connect with people across party lines.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Clark: What does being an Ohioan mean to you?
Miller: I feel a pride in Ohio. That feeling of "all right, yeah, this is good." I don't know if we're not supposed to get political or not, but I think back to the days of when I was a kid and we had Howard Metzenbaum and John Glenn as our senators.
Clark: That's right.
Miller: It's a mixed bag. We were the purple state there for a while and people are people. They're good people and most of the time, I don't know what people's political views are but you're just having a nice conversation. So I guess that's how to bridge it is to not necessarily when you meet somebody new say, "oh, well, what are your political views?".
Clark: Don't start there.
Miller: Yeah, yeah. Just see the humanity across the way and see that things change. So what does being an Ohioan mean to you? And how can we tap into those qualities to bridge the divisions in our communities?
Clark: I didn't know that being an Ohioan was a very specific thing until I left the state. I had grown up in Ohio, I lived my whole life in Ohio. I moved to Florida for a couple years and I started working for a company where they specifically ended up hiring a bunch of people from Ohio. And I was like, "why would you do that?" And then I realized that the environment that I was in, it was like "Ohioans are very productive, we do certain things" and I sort of got to know some of those idiosyncrasies of like "oh, that is an Ohio thing." I didn't realize how baked into my personality it was, I guess. I was not aware of that being a thing, but it made me proud to be from Ohio. When I left and I came back, I was like "this is actually a place that the environment is positive, for the most part," and for Dayton, specifically, this is a city of innovation. The people here are scrappy and they are also very grounded and down-to-earth, and I didn't realize how special it was until I got away from it. So how can we tap into those qualities to bridge the divisions in our communities? I think being rooted in our communities, being neighbors to our neighbors, and being people instead of talking to people on Facebook, going out of the house and talking to the people in the world around you and embracing where we are and the fact that it's all flat here and the that we can grow things here and the the fact we do have this spirit of innovation and that we do want to make things out of nothing and build things from the ground.
Miller: It's funny, you said the thing about Florida and Ohioans, because when we were in Florida last time, somebody said, "You're from Ohio, too. Everybody's from Ohio!"
Clark: Ohioans run away to Florida. I think it's because there's all those beaches. It's the closest one you can get to, it's really nice, it is very hot, you don't have to go through winter. But there were so many people from Ohio when I went down there. I was like, yep, we all run away. Ended up coming back, though.
One Small Step with WYSO is produced by the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO. This series is made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and presented by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
