Joan Rivers enshrined the phrase, “Can we talk?” in her comedic persona. I hope she will forgive me from her mansion in heaven for using her line to capture my conviction that the best reaction to the results of the November election is to fight against isolation and loneliness and just talk to each other as the essential, simple, and direct beginning of recovery.

When I woke up ten days after the election, the last thing that I felt in the mood to do was to co-chair the monthly meeting of the Ward 15 Democratic Party Committee. I was emotionally on the mat and asked my co-chair, Karen Charles, to take the lead in our discussion, which she did with admirable energy. At the end of the hour and a half meeting I was astonished to find myself in a very different place.

I offer this meeting as a hopeful sign to fellow Democrats and progressive Independents: Get together. And a warning to Republicans: Keep us apart. At this meeting a subtle but crucial thing happened: By the simple act of coming together, we broke out of the isolation that each of us found ourselves in after Nov. 5. We spent more than an hour just exchanging experiences, feelings, observations, and lessons from the earthquake in our lives caused by the presidential election results.

Rays of hope filtered through the rubble of the overall defeat: Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) was re-elected to the US Senate in Wisconsin in spite of Trump’s victory there. Rubin Gallego (D-AZ) was elected to the Senate in Arizona, the first Hispanic to do so, in spite of Trump’s victory there. Millions of Democrats did not vote, suggesting that Trump’s victory was slimmer than it appeared. (And we have since learned that his majority in the popular vote was 49.9 percent in the latest accounting, lower than initially reported.) We are hopeful that Jack Smith will release his report on the case he built against Trump. Likewise, it is hoped that the House Ethics Committee investigation of former AG nominee Matt Gaetz regarding the evidence of his alleged pedophilia and sex trafficking will become public. We did not come up with any wide-ranging solutions or conclusions, but the breaking of our individual isolation was invigorating and brought out some stars in our darkest night, to paraphrase Kamala Harris.

As I looked at the faces on the Zoom screen it occurred to me that we all had skin in the game for the next few years: immigrants, lesbians and gay men, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, senior citizens, young activists, et al. Interspersed were lessons for moving forward, like fundraising to pay for voter registration (in a ward that has the lowest turnout in the state), advocating for senior elected officials to step aside and let new people come off the bench (Elizabeth Warren will be 82 at the end of her latest term and Ed Markey is 78 and wants to run again in 2026), fighting for affordable housing and other kitchen table issues. There was a lot of sentiment to advocate for improvements to weaknesses within the party: most legislators run unopposed, the just re-elected MassDems chairman is a half-time employee, demanding that the Great and General Court and Senate not be run like Politburos.

The message to our fellow Democrats is: “Start to climb out of the hole by just finding a way to get together.” As the guy who woke up Saturday as the Big Grump and ended by getting my mojo back, I can tell you that Michelle Obama was right when she said, “Do something!” Otherwise, we will find ourselves like frogs in a pot, failing to notice that Trump is increasing the heat until we are boiled.

To avoid being boiled frogs, we can learn from some of the great thinkers, like Hannah Arendt, author of the seminal “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In that book, Arendt points out that “Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result.”

Remember Joan Rivers, “Can we talk?” and fight the isolation.

Another poet and philosopher, the beloved Irish writer John O’Donohue, makes the case that our insistence on belonging, community, and human connection is one of the greatest acts of courage and resistance in the face of oppression, when he says, “the ancient and eternal values of human life — truth, unity, goodness, justice, beauty, and love — are all statements of true belonging.”

We are not alone. We were not the majority in this election, but we were close: there are tens of millions of us throughout the country. And with help from us, we can add to those numbers. Those “trees that voted for the ax,” (some Latinos, black men, Arab Americans, women, union members) will see that Trump has no answers, only complaints. We live in hope and work to prove that democracy has answers and solutions. Start simply by channeling Joan Rivers.