Last night, my Facebook news feed was full of pictures of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk, which literally translates to “the father of Turks,” was one of the instrumental figures in founding the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and leading the Turkish independence movement against Allied forces after World War I, the first president of the Republic of Turkey and a man who worked very hard to modernize the country. The reason Ataturk’s picture was all over my news feed was because friends wanted to commemorate his legacy on the day he helped found the Grand National Assembly of Turkey: April 23, 1920.

That day was the first step in the beginning of a new era for Turkey, an era where the people had the right to speak on what direction their country would take. Ataturk was also the person who decided to commemorate this day as “National Sovereignty and Children’s Day” in Turkey.

This holiday is my favorite and probably the most important national holiday in Turkey. Before everything else, before the war against invading powers was won, before the republic was established, the founding of a national assembly gave the right to self-determination to the Turkish people, declaring they could steer the country in whichever direction they could and had the right and ability to decide the country’s fate.

But one thing that stands out is the fact that this holiday was also dedicated to the children of Turkey and later on the children of the world. It was the first national holiday in the world dedicated specifically to children and is the only national holiday in the world that is dedicated to both national sovereignty and children. But why? What did Ataturk see in children that led him to recognize them on the same day as national sovereignty day?

The simple answer is that Ataturk saw that children will always be the future.

It’s an overused phrase, really: “Children are our future.” The fact that the phrase is overused sometimes undermines the depth and reality of it. However much we would like to be able to experience as much of the world as we can, we have to realize that at some point, our generation will be obsolete. At that point, today’s children, the next generation, will be responsible for everything. They will be the sovereign power, deciding on whatever the future might bring.

When Ataturk decided to celebrate children, he wanted us to celebrate everything that make children wonderful: innocence, creativity, brightness. He wanted us to realize that every person who is not a child today can learn from children in the most basic ways.

However, more importantly, he realized that because children are the future, they are the guardians of liberty, of equality, of justice in that future. He realized that when these ideals were threatened, the children of today should be the ones to defend them tomorrow. He wanted children to defend the right to self-determination, the idea of self-sovereignty, when they grew up.

Today, it is our responsibility to stand up against injustice, against anybody who wants to take away our liberty, against anybody who puts themselves above everyone else. It is our duty to exercise our self-sovereignty to make sure we have all the basic rights we deserve. It is also our duty, however, to educate the youth of today so they can do the same tomorrow. It is our responsibility to the future.

Yoni Pinto is a Weinberg freshman. He can be reached at [email protected]. If you want to respond publicly to this column, send a letter to the editor to [email protected].