LYRICS: Give a Damn.

If you'd take the train with me
uptown, through the misery
of ghetto streets in morning light,
it's always night.

Take a window seat, put down your Times.
You can read between the lines.
Just meet the faces that you meet
beyond the window's pane.

And it might begin to teach you
how to give a damn about your fellow man.
And it might begin to reach you
how to give a damn about your fellow man.

Or put your girl to sleep sometime
with rats instead of nursery rhymes,
with hunger and your other children by her side,
and wonder if you'll share your bed
with something else which must be fed,
for fear may lie beside you
or it may sleep down the hall.

And it might begin to teach you
how to give a damn about your fellow man.
And it might begin to reach you
how to give a damn about your fellow man.

Come and see how well despair
is seasoned by the stifling air.
See your ghetto in the good old sizzling summertime.
Suppose the streets were all on fire?
The flames, like tempers, leaping higher.
Suppose you'd lived there all your life,
do you think that you would mind?

And it might begin to reach you
Why I give a damn about my fellow man.
And it might begin to teach you
How to give a damn about your fellow man.

====

From the 1960's, with love and hope.

for obscene language, dammit.

I was listening to Spanky last night. I was always in love with her voice. She does a GREAT version of "Brother Can You Spare A Dime".

could you imagine?

I can vouch for it's being banned, then, as that's right from my time frame and I never heard it in my life. Thanks for the post!

I wasn't very old when that song first came out (only nine, I believe), but I was still moved enough by it that I spent my allowance on a cloth patch that said "Give a damn," which my mother then sewed on to my windbreaker for me.