It was bad. But to avoid the poles of despair and denial, it would help to have a frame of mind, a perspective with which to consider the year gone by. And with it, a sober but bracing way to meet the headwinds and miseries that await in 2017. It could be this: a recognition of the power of unity, of drawing close, and of speaking out. Of the strength that solidarity wielded in 2016, over and over.

The most powerless of economic players, low-wage workers, kept pressing for a $15 minimum wage. Rallies across the country in November invigorated the cause, which is succeeding against long odds. More than two dozen states and localities have raised minimum wages as the movement has gone mainstream.

The most frequent targets of the dehumanizing rhetoric of the Trump campaign — immigrants and refugees — found welcome in many communities. Families opened their homes to displaced Syrians. Churches gave sanctuary to unauthorized immigrants. Governors and mayors, teachers and lawyers, faith leaders and congregations vowed to resist any efforts to demonize the foreign-born.

There and elsewhere was evidence that the center could hold, and reason and compassion prevail.

National protests shone a harsh light on police killings of black civilians. Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama inspired millions, their achievements and grace rebuking the sour misogyny of the Trump campaign. American Indians in North Dakota braved rubber bullets and water cannons to protect their drinking water from an oil pipeline. Nations of the world — all threatened by a warming planet — ratified the Paris climate agreement. The global health community found ways to subdue the Zika virus and create an effective Ebola vaccine. The death penalty in the United States kept sliding into history’s dustbin. Some states, reflecting strong public support, began tilting the gun debate in the direction of sanity.

The forces of disunity are strong, but our job is to make the country less divided than Donald Trump’s splintering campaign has left it. A Roman Catholic priest, James Martin, in a powerful essay after the election, counseled combatants to give one another the benefit of the doubt — while remaining ready to defend those likely to suffer in the coming administration: “the homeless, the unemployed, the underemployed, the disabled, the sick.”