Martin Luther King’s speech at the March on Washington was supposed to be lowkey. He wanted to appeal to a broad audience, so he settled on a speech built around a boring metaphor about a bounced check. But then, midway through the speech, something special happened.

King hit a clunky sentence and went off script, knowing the speech wasn’t hitting what it needed to. The gospel singer Mahalia Jackson noticed what was happening and shouted from behind him: “Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!”

King looked back at Jackson, looked back to his written speech, paused, slid it to the left, grabbed the lectern, looked out at the crowd, and began the prophecy that we all know as the “I have a dream” speech.

Watching some of the disappointing results today — and staring down the prospect of more divided, tired government preventing us from being able to sufficiently address today’s crises — my mind kept returning to Jackson’s call: “Tell them about the dream!”

There’s going to be a lot of necessary, reactive hand-to-hand combat in the coming years: securing good cabinet picks, resisting corrupt compromises, and more. But what we can’t lose track of is that there’s a need to tell people about the dream.

There’s an America that we can achieve in our lifetime where everyone has health care, stable housing, and free time. There’s an America where most workers go to work in a unionized workplace or cooperative. There’s an America leading a global green industrial revolution.

There’s an America where we build more schools and fewer jails, trading the shallow national unity of ‘law and order’ for the deep national unity that can only come through justice and solidarity.

There’s an America where caregiving is valued more than profit-making, where everyone plays a part in co-creating our country, and where mutual respect is the core of our culture.

This America is within reach within a generation. We can live in this America. Our children can live in this America. But only if we keep telling people about the dream—and invite them to join us in realizing it together.