Give a Damn

If you take a train with me

Uptown to the misery

Of ghetto streets in morning light

Ooh, they're 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 teach you

How to give a damn about your fellow man

Where would you go to sleep sometimes

With rats instead of nursery rhymes?

With a hunger and your other children by her side

And you wonder if you'll share your bed

With something else that must be fed

For fear may lay beside you

Or, at most, 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 teach you

How to give a damn about your fellow man

Come and see how well despair is seasoned by the stifling air

See our ghetto in the good old sizzling summertime

Suppose the streets were all on fire

The flames, like tempers, leaping high

Suppose you lived there all your life

Do you think that you would mind?

And it might begin to reach you

How we give a damn about our fellow man

And it might begin to teach you

How to give a damn about your fellow man

And I might have got to reach you

Oh, don't give a damn, hmm

Hmm, hmm, hmm

Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm

Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm

Hmm, hmm, hmm

Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm