I came back to a snowy Valley laden with thick white cobwebs and icy clumps on the tree branches that loved to fall on the ground smack in front of me as I walked Aussie today, getting my daily dose of beauty and fresh air.

Martin Luther King said that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice. The words are beautiful, if somewhat unverifiable. I have no doubt that we make progress as human beings. I don’t miss the tribalism and brutality of the past, I don’t miss the One Hundred Year War and the Thirty-Year War, depredations in the name of religion. I don’t miss slavery, feudalism, or crinolines and hoops, I’d look terrible wearing one of those. This winter it’s always the same warm, lined jeans and a sweater, not much to dressing so I don’t need a servant to help me out.

But is progress justice? Think of the tribes that have been destroyed, the rates of extinction of species—who am I to call that justice? Scientists say that in the Great Extinction that took place some 250 million years ago, over 90% of marine species and 70% of land-based vertebrate species died off, unable to survive the cataclysmic changes happening to the earth. Humans would have had no chance.

You know something? It doesn’t matter; I love MLK for saying those words. Great leaders have to give courage and hope even when inside they themselves feel in tatters, and MLK had plenty of those days, according to his biographers.

“Redescribing a world is a necessary first step to changing it,” Salman Rushdie wrote.

When you use words, you create a world. Think of the books you used to read to your children and how their features would relax and they would even smile before dozing off, relaxed and confident towards tomorrow. Their parent, be it through her/his words or the words of a writer, has described a world of beneficent sun and stars, well-intentioned dinosaurs, a boy and a girl playing in the sand, two chipmunks having a conversation. The word peace may not even be mentioned, but what underlies those stories is a world at peace. A world of justice.

Those stories have a lot to do with how we get up in the morning: “Come on, up up up, sun is shining, birds been singing for a long time,” and the implication is that only you are missing to make this world perfect.

So, we redescribe the world to our children even in the face of killings, house-bombings, and family separations. We tell them about wild things and the friendship of a pig and a spider, hungry caterpillars and dogs finding home at the end of a long journey. Others redescribe the world as fearful. I have a friend whose every other word is scary. Each story is as true as any other story and there is no sense in blinding ourselves to the injustices of life.

None of it has any intrinsic meaning except what we give it. King, in the face of fire bombings of his home and threats to his family and to his life, found his own meaning and redescribed the world, the moral universe, as following a tortuous path but bending towards justice. In redescribing it, he began to change it. He made the implausible plausible, a fairy tale become a tale, become reality.