"We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now."

MLK said that.

MLK was born on January 15th, way back in 1929.  It is strange to think that while there is a feeling of a contemporariness about his life, his centenary is coming up in nine years!

It is beyond my wildest imagination how MLK could have been optimistic during the short years that he lived.  To be that optimistic, even while fully knowing the horrors and horrible people all around, makes him an extraordinary human being--warts and all.

I, on the other hand, in an immensely more comfortable setting in 2020, am always way more pessimistic than MLK could have ever been, it seems like.

As I look around, I don't see people with significant standing encouraging us with "we shall overcome."  They are not reassuring us that the moral arc of the universe does indeed bend towards justice.

"We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now."

The first time I listened to MLK's "Mountaintop" speech, and when he built up the "if I had sneezed," it was a combination of tears and joy.  No shame in admitting to it.  The man literally moved me to tears.

I was ready to act on his “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

After listening to his "we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago," I was ready to go and punch a few people, despite my pacifism.

His words, his oration, his cadence, his tone, moved me even though I came to his words decades after he was assassinated.

We're all in the same boat now.  But, heading where?