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"Don't think of me as Emerson or Henry D. Thoreau,
The mind and earth my temple, to nature I must go.
Let divinity of soul be my only guide,
From this awful sad society, now I must go and hide.

TranscenDental, won't offer root canals.
TranscenDental, won't ever touch those mouths.

I'm like Emile Hirsch from "Into the Wild",
Born and raised at Walden Pond, I am an only child.
The part will always outweigh the sum,
Transcendentalism will always be number 1.

TranscenDental, won't offer root canals.
TranscenDental, won't ever touch those mouths.

Civil disobedience is what I've come to preach,
Love for the individual a message I did teach.
If with my strict ideology, your viewpoints just don't agree,
Then live in homes, I'll be alone; transcendentalism's the life for me.

TranscenDental, won't offer root canals.
TranscenDental, won't ever touch those mouths.

TranscenDental, won't offer root canals.
TranscenDental, won't ever touch those mouths."

*The song makes a funny play on the word "dental" by pointing out that "transcendental" doesn't have anything to do with a visit to get one's teeth cleaned. However, if that's not what it means, then what does "transcend" mean?

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Walden by Henry David Thoreau  Brief Plot Summary

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Read the following quotes & excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience and then answer the discussion question underneath.

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government [...] then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine."

"Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to have this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man."

**DISCUSSION QUESTION** --> If you had to take a difficult stand for something that you REALLY believed in, what would that cause be? Please write 3-4 sentences explaining the scenario, WHAT you would do, and WHY you would make your difficult choice.