> I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a race and

> I think the point they were making is that if our generation were faced with the same question as theirs (Another sovereign nation is exterminating a race and seeks world domination, what should we do?), we'd be paralyzed by a lack of community. World War II was running for two years prior to the involvement of the United States. The US passed a series of Neutrality Acts to keep out of the war. In the years prior to 1941, the president actually deployed US naval assets in the European theater as resource carriers in arguable contradiction of the desire of Congress to stay out of the situation entirely. U.S. domestic opinion on involvement in the European-Asian war was very divided until Pearl Harbor. A United States that got up and fought against world domination under its own initiative without the prompting of Pearl Harbor is very revisionist history. And if I may editorialize... I don't think that the sense of community that your wife's grandparents remember was a "natural" state that we've "lost." I think it was a side-effect of national galvanization under a war effort, and it is not without its negatives (keep an eye out for an "us vs. them" mentality that can make it hard to accept perceived past enemies as equal people). There are a lot of advantages to that sense of community; I'd like to hope we can build it anew without the need for bloody global conflict as a trigger.