Which Is There More Of: Kindness Or Unkindness? A Christmas Accounting is another special reflection by Robert Krulwich over at NPR.

Here’s an excerpt:

People will improve, [Martin Luther King] told them. He couldn’t say when, but one day, he said, people will be kinder to each other, fairer, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

History, Dr. King presumed, has a direction… But if history is bending, who does the bending? Does the world perfect us? Or do we have to roll up our sleeves and perfect the world?

King didn’t say, not directly, but 40 years later, then Illinois senator Barack Obama, talking about Dr. King, assumed that history does bend, “It bends towards justice,” he said, “but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice…”