EMERSON!!!

This reading gave me some difficulty.  I eventually read the whole thing out loud to try and understand more.  From what I can gather, Emerson begins the writing by telling the reader not to keep their ideas to themselves because someday someone will say those thoughts out loud and your thoughts will be stolen from you.  He also talks about the youth and how they have merit work and thoughts even if they seem quiet to an adult.  Emerson stresses that every man is different and this is not a bad thing and instead of conforming man should strive to be different.  All of the people we refer to as great now are the ones that said strange ideas in their time.  He said that God made every man to be different and that if we conform to what everyone else is doing we are losing ourselves as God made us.

I love that Emerson writes about how good it is to be different.  He's trying to get Americans at the time to break away from the mob mentality of just going along with what the group thinks.  In our history it's found that when mob mentality comes out there is so much harm done.  Emerson is trying to open their eyes so they can realize that saying their thoughts is not a bad thing and that it's good to be different than everyone around them.

The beginning he mentions Moses, Plato and Milton (line 25) and how they spoke up in their times and said something different than what everyone else was saying.  We now remember those people because of the "radical" ideas they had then.  However, those ideas didn't turn out to be as crazy as people thought.  These famous people have shaped our society with their actions and writings. Emerson is continually trying to show Americans how group think isn't the way to handle the country of themselves as individuals.

I also like how he brings God into his writing.  In America at the time religion was very important.  For him to say that God doesn't want you to be like everyone else I feel like would be very influential to many different people.  I feel like they might take those thoughts and really consider how God would want them to act.  However, as much as I would like for them to have thought about that I also know that Americans then did whatever they felt was just and had no remorse.  I also see in a lot of writing that Americans would twist their faith to accommodate whatever they wanted to do.