Give a Damn

If you'd take the train with me

Uptown, thru 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 teach 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 teach you

How to give a damn about your fellow man

Come and see how well despair

Is seasoned by the stif'ling 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

D'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