Together with StoryCorps, WYSO invited community members to take part in One Small Step, bringing people from across the region together for conversations with someone they’d never met.
In this final episode, we meet Paul Wesselmann of Cincinnati and Carrie Scarff of Dayton. They met at WYSO’s Chuck Berry Studio in downtown Dayton and found they shared a sense of despair about the state of the world. Through books, they came to see that those feelings are connected to caring deeply, and that hope is something you actively choose rather than wait for.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Wesselmann: It is understandable why there is so much despair right now. And I don't know if you're familiar with Joanna Macy's this book, Act of Hope. She was an environmental climate change person and started talking about conflict resolution and she came up with this interesting model around hope and how important it is, even when times are hard - especially when times hard - to be able to maintain a hopeful outlook. Because plenty of people say for me to be hopeful is naive. And I think I know what naive hope looks like. And I think I'm very not naive. I think the world's a big mess. I think it's going to get worse. I think we might be somewhere with climate change that we're past so many tipping points that there's really nothing left to do, but fix things enough to make the downfall a little less awful. It could be that bad. Democracy, I think there's hope that, that our country recovers from this. I hate to have a microphone in front of me when I say, I don't think it's years, I think it'd probably decades. I think, when you look at things, the way things are stacked right now is not going to be easy to undo. And our country's history is measured in centuries and not decades and not years. And history of civilization is measured in thousands of years. Existence of humans, hundreds of thousands of years, possibly more, right? Millions. This is, our little experiment is that little tip of a finger. Do we somehow get through this? Sure. If we are making decisions that are making it inhospitable for humans to stay on this planet, does the planet recover? Oh yeah. And have we possibly torn through our lease and we're gonna lose our deposit? It's possible and Mother Earth is gonna be just fine.
Scarff: It's interesting also, another book that I read recently that gave me hope was A Gentleman in Moscow. It was a gentleman in Moscow at the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, he was part of the aristocracy, and he was arrested and should have been killed but they thought he wrote a poem in support of the revolution. And so they let him live, but he was confined to the Moscow hotel. And it was a story of the next three or four decades of him living in the hotel while this whole revolution that was supposed to be so liberal and so supportive of all the people ended up turning on the people. What I took from it is all of the humanity was still there on a personal level. The people were good, even the people who were out executing this new government that was doing a lot of horrible things, when engaged on a person level were good people. And as I watch what's happening in the country, I know that my life, my friends even the ones who think differently than me, is still full of people who are good and caring and kind. And I take the opportunities that I have to stay hopeful, to stay strong, to stay informed, so that when the time comes, I am not beaten down by the despair, but strengthened by what's around me to act and make the difference that I can.
Wesselmann: Yes.
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.
