Democracy and Stupidity and Election Day

I'd like to think that democracy is a good thing, yet so many people are clueless about the the world--they live in a delusion, an infantile fantasy world. Recall that the Germans elected Hitler. Here, because we have been so far away from the rest of the world, we've been able to survive idiots as leaders--and mete out vicious harm on the hopeless minority groups: indigenous people and their descendants, blacks, immigrants, anyone perceived as different or vulnerable. I recall once going to a Catholic wedding and seeing the eucharist and thinking, no wonder they despise(d) the Jews, those who refused this communion. It would have taken an astonishing, mostly impossible courage and moral imagination to resist the demands of the church hierarchy and accept others not in the religious community as human. And this from people who, in Protestant America, themselves were often despised and destroyed. I'm reading David Mura's Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. He went to my high school, maybe in the class a year or two ahead of me, and writes about the secret, hidden world of suburban Japanese Americans. In Skokie, I had grown up thinking that no one on the planet could have lived in a more boring, less potentially "novelistic" environment. I should have known better: I should have known about the rage and frustration that existed behind closed doors. Joyce should have clued me into that--the lives of quiet, often inarticulate desperation. Of course, there were many (are many) who live in a kind of oblivion, idiotically unaware of what their society inflicts on others or even delighted by it, yet any society will inevitably produce some, a few, someone, who are (is) aware of the brutality, who live(s) with the knowledge of terrible crimes (the Holocaust, Japanese internment, slavery, systemic discrimination, thwarted hopes and dreams, just the generalized stupidity of massive bureaucratic organizations, the clumsy, callous pain meted out on defenseless, unknowing people) that have been committed, continue to be committed. Can we have democracy and obliviousness? If someone doesn't know--can't know or won't know--should he or she be allowed to vote? Hitler wanted to kill Jewish women and children because he didn't want their descendants trying to gain revenge. (I'm not even talking about the crime of killing anyone--men, women or children.) And sure enough, he was able to locate enough others who, for whatever reason--racism, fear, routine, indifference, sadism, nihilism--decided to kill defenseless others. The idea that the Jews offered a threat! A people without weapons, accustomed to take whatever punishments those in power decided to inflict, a hopeless minority (some peasants in small villages, others sophisticated urbanites--it didn't matter)--these are the people he sees as the direst threat against Germany! He might as well have accused falling leaves of betraying the nation: they presented the same level of danger. And then, of course, whoever survived turned into fanatics themselves--in different ways, of course. The Jewish Century looks at three examples: the socialists in Russia who themselves became the victims of a lunatic, the capitalists in America who through education and perserverance climbed into the middle class, and the nationalists in Israel who must see virtually anyone as an enemy. Revenge, indeed.