Every so often, I have to stop, catch my breath, and remind myself that we’re not dead yet. That’s fairly good advice for living through a cavalcade of calamities.

One of Trump’s latest executive orders is sending us back 60 years in the ethics of mental health care as well as teeing up a way to imprison any dissidents or undesirables the administration deems as such. His sycophants have already attempted to introduce a bill that would allow them to classify “Trump Derangement Syndrome” as a mental illness (which thankfully fell flat on its face, especially after one of its Republican sponsors was arrested for soliciting a minor). If they haven’t lumped trans people in the “throw them into the loony bin” box, we’re probably right there behind the homeless folks. And, regardless, about a quarter of trans people are homeless anyway because of the discrimination and lack of acceptance we face.

(I wonder sometimes if I have TDS, but then I remember he’s literally a cartoon parody of an evil villain and am vindicated, but I digress. RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!)

But despite the vast scale and insurmountable flow of tragedies befalling our nation, one thing is clear. None of us, individually, have the power to stop it. Or, rather, none of us has the power to stop it alone.

The only, and I mean only, way we have of fighting back as normal people is to band together. Easier said than done when we’ve had our organizations dying on us for decades. Unions are much weaker, church attendance is down, neighborhood events are few and far between, if there are any, and civic engagement belongs almost solely to the retired. Interpersonal trust is low. Work and the internet is the majority of social interaction for a disturbingly large fraction of our population. Men don’t know how to talk with women, and women don’t trust men. A person smiling at us, the waitress calling you “honey” at your favorite restaurant, getting physical contact from the dentist–we are starving for the tiniest scraps of human connection.

The world was not always like this. We can connect with each other like our forebears did. We can break out of the loneliness that binds us and keeps us trapped with ourselves. We can band together to change what we hate about the world, and we can solve our growing loneliness crisis.

All it takes is someone to break the ice. It can be the flimsiest excuse to talk to someone you see every day. It can be starting a new club. It can be hosting a neighborhood barbeque–not with just your old friends from high school or work, but from the people you live next to and should really know their names by now.

I’ve been attempting to organize my neighborhood for a while now. There’s a group of about five of use that meets pretty much every week–all I have to do is send out a message. They’re all extroverts, of course, and seem hungry for company. We don’t even do anything in particular (at least, not yet). But even still, it’s a highlight for some of us in our week! We get to catch up, talk about the problems in our neighborhood, and commiserate. It’s really nice. And all it took was me printing some flyers and sticking them on doors. Of course, my aims are slightly grander than a social club, but it really does strike me how easy it was, once I got past the initial fright.

You can do it, too. If you don’t have the bandwidth to make a club, join one. Clubs are full of old folks who are desperately wanting to pass on their knowledge and skills to the next generation. They’re hungry for connection, too! And, honestly, old fogey hobbies like birdwatching are actually WAY cooler than they sound. You’ll just have to trust me on that.

So, my ask to you is to join a club or a cause. Search in your town for something that sounds interesting. Perhaps a book club, perhaps a poker group, perhaps a church, perhaps a non-profit you like. And go to a physical meeting, for Pete’s sake. Online is nice, but it’s not the same. It’s the diet version of social interaction. Go have the real thing! Even if you’re the introverted type, you’ll leave with the good kind of tiredness and not the “I just worked customer service for 8 hours” tiredness that you might be used to.

And, once you’ve tasted the real thing, you’ll know I’m not lying to you. Our bonds with the people who live near and around us are powerful, and they’re MORE than worth having. And those bonds, those shared experiences, are how we start to band together to shape the world how we want it to be. Right now, it’s shaped almost exclusively by narcissistic pricks. I don’t know who you are, but I’d rather have you influencing things than keep who we have now.

Godspeed.