Driving around this afternoon NPR played the entire Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” speech and I realized that I had never heard the whole thing before.

Listening to the words brings back the feeling of the time in a way I hadn’t considered recently. For someone born more than two decades after the speech was given I don’t have actual memories of the era.

Civil rights was something that was taught in elementary school about a week after the Civil War and in a way they were almost connected in my mind when I was in elementary school. Distant events that are part of history.

But listening to the speech (for the first time, really) built that era back up and reminded me it was not so long ago. And how important tomorrow really is, whether you voted for Barack Obama or not.

Here’s the whole thing. Listen and think.