You have just depressed the hell out of me.

Time for some Pete Seeger.

How can you and your brothers and sisters feel so much pressure to be just like each other? So much so that you feel compelled to jump off the same cliff no matter what becomes of those who went before you?

I Know we’ve fought this individualist war before. I thought we’d won, but I must have been wrong, since you and your brothers and sisters are coming out of the NEA’s mills like so many uniform, characterless pigs in a poke.

How, in this ultimate be-whatever-and-do-whatever-you-want age can so many people feel compelled to be and do exactly what the herd is and does?

I was a part of the last be-what-you-want-to-be generation, and to be honest, most of you look like storm troopers to me. Your uniforms might vary, but psychologically you’re the most undifferentiated group I’ve ever seen, like the Stepford Wives — without the sense of humor. (I know, you don’t get the joke. That’s the point.)

The fact that anyone needs to be told what you just told me knocks the stuffing out of my faith in humans. But then I have never met a group of young humans with perspectives as uniformly narrow as young Americans.

Get to know Cubans well enough for them to trust you and they’ll tell you their many and varied dreams for when Cuba’s free. Get to know African guerrillas well enough and they’ll tell you the many and varied things they’d do if they could get away from Africa. Get to know young Americans and they all want to go to college and work in tech or media or some quasi-government save the earth environmental agency, or dissemble censored information through the government itself.

Ask young Americans for opinions on contentious issues, and there is no contention, there is no dissent. 99.9% of young Americans are entirely invested in the same things the other 99.9% believe. The be-who-you-are generation has become the be-exactly-the-same-as-everyone-else generation.

The Brownshirts were a lifetime before me, but I have to wonder if this is what Berlin felt like in 1933, when almost every young German saw the world in exactly the same light and the few who didn’t either fled or were repressed or killed.

Find me a young American who takes the opposite side of any contentious debate, please, find a young American who doesn’t believe firmly in the evils of anthropogenic global warming, the evils of public ownership of firearms, the evils of income inequality, the evils of having to support your children, the evils of having to pay your debts, or the evils of having to make your way in the world instead of forcing other people to make it for you, please, find me one, because I haven’t.

Young Americans occupy the most narrow intellectual ground of any group to which I’ve ever been exposed. Not even in communist Vietnam did I find so many people who believed the individual bears no responsibility for himself — whatever’s wrong in his life is society’s fault and responsibility.

I’m not saying uniformity of view is immoral, but I am saying it’s bad, very bad (I’m not a Trumpite, but every once in while a Trumpism is appropriate), because what if you’re in 100% agreement and…god forbid…you’re 100% wrong, like the Brownshirts, the Hitler Youth, what if your completely perfect consensus about important issues turns out to be perfectly and importantly wrong? Who amongst you will be willing to say anything and risk the disapproval of the majority?

You are the most repressive people I have ever met outside of the Direccio’n de Inteligencia in Cuba. An American college student who doesn’t believe in the standard issues of dogmatic faith risks almost as much as a Cuban who doesn’t support Castro.

Too show you how lopsided young Americans are, let’s consider your mention (aghast and fearful) of the President Elect. I supported and campaigned for someone else. I am not a Trumpista. In fact, I’ve posted a number of things distinctly anti-Trump. He worries me. We have some idea what real estate developer Trump was like and a better idea what reality TV star Trump was like, but we have no idea what President Trump will be like.

However, if you’ll study her past and her positions and take a few thousand steps back, you’ll find President Clinton would have been a fascist, an authoritarian who uses force of government to control people’s lives. She’s been a fascist almost all of her life. The fact that young Americans don’t see her as a fascist is an indication of how far down the authoritarian road we’ve walked.

Take a half step back and Bernie Sanders is a communist, who’d give you free stuff, all the way to the salt mines. Communism, if you understand it, is not a joking matter. Sure, you’re equal to the rest of the mob, but what that means, inevitably, is you all get to starve together in the gulags, while your politburo buddies live it up in their dachas.

Communism is the system wherein those who are good at violence and willing to use it rise to the top, and those who aren’t, work themselves to death to support the ones at the top. It is, in a way, the perfect division of labor between those who aim the guns and those at whom the guns are being aimed.

I will note nobody was ever shot sneaking into Russia or East Germany or Cuba. There must be a reason, but I bet the NEA hasn’t taught anything about it in an American school in the past few decades. Ever wonder why you’re constantly told the Western World is so bad, yet untold multitudes have died trying to escape socialist paradises to get to it? Ever wondered?

We used to be The Land of the Free, but starting about a century ago we’ve gradually become less free, more restricted, and more dependent. We’ve dragged that sledge far enough that the harness feels so normal we can’t imagine ourselves without it. In fact, we’ve become so afraid of freedom, that at every opportunity we give more of it away, to continue feeling the security of our harnesses.

I don’t know what President Trump will be like. He may turn out to be an unthinking or unwise leader, maybe an unfair populist, maybe a fool, but he’s not a king, and if he’s bad enough we can get rid of him.

The ongoing universal despair of young Americans at Sanders’ loss to Hillary and her loss to Trump displays an uncritical group-think that frightens me much more than Donnie Trump. Presidents aren’t dictators, but in post-Constitutional America majorities are — no matter how irrational or ill-informed, and the fact that most young Americans feel they should be able to force me to change my life, contrary to the Constitution, because they say so is frightening.

If the Constitution has no meaning, if all that matters is the consensus of the majority, let’s do this, the average height of male Americans is 5' 9", the average height of female Americans is 5' 3 1/2" — let’s settle on 5' 8" and 5' 2 1/2" and vote everyone shorter into slavery. If we can’t quite get enough votes at 5' 8" and 5' 2 1/2" lets go shorter, until we can finally get a consensus of Americans to vote their shorter bretheren into slavery.

If all that matters is the consensus of the majority, then there’s no moral reason we can’t bring slavery back, as long as a majority votes for it.

And I’m afraid I find every young American to whom I’ve talked burdens him or herself with that same popular, populist belief — that everyone should be ruled by the consensus of the majority.

You are not liberals, as am I, you are the opposite of liberal, you are authoritarian.

Hitler couldn’t have shipped 6 million Jews and a similar number of Gypsies, homosexuals and handicapped to the gas chambers without the consensus of the German people.

Not only isn’t the consensus of the majority always right, it’s usually wrong, and sometimes it’s terribly wrong, and in my travels around the world, the group I find most like what the Hitler Youth must have been, the group that marches most solidly in rank is — young Americans. You were raised to be uncritical fascists, and uncritical and fascistic you seem to be.