For those who awakened Wednesday feeling brokenhearted and deeply afraid, perhaps the best tonic is to turn off the news and unplug from Facebook just for a while. As long, ominous headlines speculate what President-elect Trump will do, who he will appoint, what executive orders he’ll overturn, it’s hard to regain equilibrium.

If only the internet went down for a week and all we could do is converse with our neighbors, we might recall that each of us is more complex than a vote we did or did not cast.

We might remember how during the ice storm of 2008 when thousands lost power, folks helped each other cut away fallen trees. We huddled in local shops trading stories and lending supplies. And we did so without divulging party affiliation or ideological bent. For a couple of weeks when we needed each other, and couldn’t check email so easily or watch TV, we hunkered in our cold dark houses, grateful for the warmth of community.

It might help to remember the resiliency and incomprehensible graciousness evinced by those whose lived experience confirms that bigotry and rancor, though amplified of late, are nothing new. The visibility of white supremacy may owe a debt to the internet but nary an African American has missed its existence in the last 240 years. The 19th- and early 20th-century Irish and Italian immigrants met with anti-Catholicism and xenophobia as staunch as the iterations of hostility today. Long before Donald Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, almost 130,000 Japanese-Americans suffered in internment camps.

Understandably, we want to believe that as a country we have moved beyond such blatant injustice, so the ones who remind us otherwise garner our contempt. But contempt will not serve us. Better to summon the example of Congressman John Lewis, who rose from the ground, skull split by police, somehow able to hold fast to love. And for all the gridlock in Congress he’s witnessed, the poisoned waters in Flint, the communities of color decimated by mass incarceration, still Lewis sits on the floor of the U.S. House, in solidarity with colleagues white and brown, making what he calls “the good kind of trouble.”

Perhaps now the stark reality apparent in the uptick of hate crimes will jar us to act – not just to knock on doors and ask for votes – but to call out any language that subverts compassion, including our own. We can organize locally, we can keep holding community conversations, inviting the folks who don’t typically come. We can seek out and listen carefully to the people whose politics mystify us. We can replace judgment with curiosity — “Would you tell me the story of how you came to feel as you do?” instead of “How the hell could you vote that way?”

To be sure, not everyone will accept the invitation nor seek a deeper conversation. Still, we all long to be heard. To have our pain and fear validated, aspirations respected, longings acknowledged. There are ways to transform desolation into possibility. We can live with integrity, attending to what connects us and reminds us we are related, not the same. In our daily practice, we can embody the moral arc of the universe as it bends toward justice.

We can learn more about nonviolent communication in an upcoming workshop sponsored by Monadnock Restorative Community, Dec. 2-4 in Keene. For more information go to http://www.opencommunication.org.Last week, we lost Leonard Cohen, but not his words: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

Leaf Seligman lives in Jaffrey.