TWAICB Director Sandy Sohcot says: “Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead have played a major role in my life since my first Grateful Dead concert in 1972. During my 2001-2013 tenure as Executive Director of the Rex Foundation, I felt a profound responsibility to honor the spirit behind all that I felt Jerry Garcia brought to his music and humankind.
“When I began working on The World As It Could Be program, I hoped that it would make sense to Jerry to include human rights in our work. Then, recently, I heard a Jerry Garcia Band rendition of Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Strugglin’ Man,’ with Jerry’s voice plaintively singing, “Every man has a right to live, love is all that we have to give, together we struggle by our will to survive, then together we fight just to stay alive.”
“I heard a strong message about human rights in his voice, as in the words. I’d like to think that he would feel good that we are raising awareness about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its aspirational principles for a better world, just as the concluding song line say, ‘So we plan for tomorrow as we live for today.'”
