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, Candace Potter of Kettering and Tony Barnes of Dayton met at the Huber Heights Branch of the Dayton Metro Library to talk about online polarization and how face-to-face conversation can be a relief. They agreed that choosing empathy helps make the world feel less chaotic.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Potter: I've always enjoyed meeting new people and having conversations and learning about what brings them joy in life. So recently in the last two years or so, I feel like all of my inputs have been through social media and news, everything. It seems like people are very likely one side or the other and nobody has anything in common anymore. But my experience outside of those little pockets of the news and social media is that people are still the same and very nice. And so I thought this would be an awesome opportunity to meet someone new and find out new things and have a positive experience amongst all the chaos that seems to be happening right now.
Barnes: Ditto. Nothing's going to get solved by not making those steps. I feel like there's a lack of gray area when it comes to people and their decisions or morals or values or opinions and it's often like you can't even get to that point to have that conversation. It's either you're 100% with me or you're 100% against me. To me, that's not the way the world is. That is very easy to do with social media because you kind of curate your climate. We're all kind of helplessly on this spinning rock and no one knows what's going on. So why are we hyper-focused on the small differences and not celebrating the big similarities? That's how I see it.
Potter: Yeah.
Barnes: I've always tried to use whatever bit of power I had to try to help you. I kind of had a crash course, culturally, in junior high, even though I grew up in the suburbs with a bunch of friends from a bunch of different countries.
Potter: Oh, cool.
Barnes: So that really shaped my opinion of that. And you see your friends getting hassled because they're Korean. I think it really laid down this foundation for me to try to be the peacemaker, to always help people.
Potter: Growing up, I had a neighborhood where there were different people from different places. Some from Mexico, others from India. So I would go to each person's house and hear them speaking their native language and want to learn it. I think that's translated to the rest of my life, where I feel like I want to make people feel welcome and comfortable. So anytime I have a patient that speaks another language, I try to at least find like, how do I say "hello" or "how are you?" Just for a second, and then it's like, "oh," and then they start speaking and I'm like, "oh crap, that's all I know!"
Barnes: [Laughs] All tapped out and still on chapter one!
Potter: My parents have always instilled in me the thought that people are good. If you come across someone that you just really don't like, or they're doing something that's just not tolerable, each person can teach you something. Even if it's to just be nothing like them in the future, you can at least take a lesson from each experience, each interaction, and carry forward. It's exposure, putting the phone down, talking to people, having interactions, looking out the car window and seeing things go by rather than trying to watch a screen.
Barnes: I do believe everyone's the same. It's just different languages, different foods, different cultures, different colors, but everybody wants the same thing.
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.
