Afternoon Baseball

"Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit; -- not to be reckoned one character; -- not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends, -- please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar," delivered August 31, 1837

From the end of a lecture from one of the quintessential essayists and orators that our country has ever had. Our country had hundreds of millions fewer people then than it does now, and yet Emerson already worried of the disappearance of humanity into the masses only, absent of individuals with unique thinking.