Make A Wish

I remember driving to Lake Charles, Louisiana in the late '90s.   I stopped off at a mall and walked around.  I observed a family celebrating a child's birthday party.  There was a cake topped with toy soldiers and tanks.  Caught my eye, and made me think a bit.  Our brains, actions, choices and likes/dislikes are shaped by families and culture, for better or worse. source The reason why the abominations of war are so little deplored, in this boasted age of light, is because children have been educated for war, brought up to honor it, from the time when their little hands could marshal a file of tin soldiers in the nursery, or rub-a-dub a drum round the door-yard to the time when they themselves have put on the piebald, harlequin livery of a soldier, to be gazed at by the other children, as much less silly than themselves as they are less advanced in years.  In this way, before they came to years of discretion, their habits had been fixed by others, who, though they may have arrived at the years, have missed the discretion that belongs to them.  Horace Mann, from the Common School Journal, 1846.