“1968” was ook 1968 in de VS: Lyndon Johnson zocht geen tweede termijn als president. Na de moord op Robert Kennedy was er nog één mogelijke kandidaat ter linkerzijde, Eugene McCarthy, en die mocht beslist geen kandidaat worden. De apparatsjik Hubert Humphrey won de nominatie en verloor de verkiezingen tegen Richard Nixon.
Folkgroep Spanky & Our Gang hadden in die dagen deze plaat uit, die als campagnelied voor McCarthy gebruikt is. Jammer maar helaas. En een echte hit is dit ook niet geworden.
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 that 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 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 it might begin to reach you
How to give a damn about your fellow man
Give a damn
