Emerson

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

My life is for me, not for anyone else, and everything that surrounds the being of me is senseless, it is absurd. Ralph Waldo Emerson depicts a man that lives his own life without the pressures of the people surrounding his life, without a minute care of what people think. It is a forward track and every person laughing and pointing beside that track might as well be invisible. In Self Reliance, by Emerson, he speaks of great men that can live in the world as normal men and yet "...keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude (Emerson 228)."

I know that a person with a perfect forward track is unlikely to come by. To simply not care what people think about you, your ideas and your morals is unrealistic in today's age. Everyone has a void that they fill with another's opinion to support their very own. I find myself looking for something to reassure the purpose and direction of my life and the decisions I have made. In America, people look for an O.K., whether it's

subconscious or not, of any form before they make a decision in their life. Emerson yearns for a culture that does everything we as a nation do not, and dreads everything we have come to have known as "necessary", or "important".

I know only one man that Emerson would even think to respect. That man is my grandfather, John Onica. In the 1960's, my grandfather craved and worked for African American acceptance; he has always said it "was just something I had to do." John Onica's concerns were anything but what people thought. He protested and was jailed once, and kept moving on, because it was just part of his path. People's thoughts at the time were never encouraging yet never fazed him. He was without a follower from even his very own family. Somewhat like Emerson, he was pure of other's beliefs flooding his mind.

My grandfather never ceased to support his judgment through the years. When I was ten, I labeled a child at school as "the black kid"; I got a piece of his mind. He was not too truculent, but instantly began to tell me of his personal fight and the risks he took to pursue his vision. He explained how his friends disappeared from his life and how he shamed his