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

(On the occasion of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I am re-posting here a slightly edited version of a post from a few months ago.)

MLK said that.

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

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

In these trump times, and with a growing threat, worldwide, to liberty and the protection of the rights of minorities, 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.

Even the skies seemingly darken, I remind myself with MLK saying, "We may have come on different ships, but we’re all in the same boat now," and I cannot help but wonder how he kept his spirits up and also managed to feed optimism into others.

The first time I listened to MLK's "Mountaintop" speech, I cried.  When he built up the "if I had sneezed," it was a combination of tears and joy. 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.

The fact that MLK voiced these decades ago did not matter in that moment.  His words, his oration, his cadence, his tone, and the image of his face, moved me even though I came to his words decades after he was assassinated.

The reality is that we're all in the same boat now.  But, heading where?  And, who will get us to the promised land?