Undermined once again by reality, the very day after posting a snide comment like “there’s no Children’s Day,” what do we land on? Children’s Day. It all started in 1857 in Chelsea, Massachusetts when a church held a special service dedicated to children. At the time they called it Rose Day, but in a prescient moment, possibly realizing the potential for future confusion with the British actress Rosie Day (who would’t be born for many decades), they changed the name to Flower Sunday. Eventually they settled on Children’s Day, and kept celebrating it on the second Sunday every June. It became a national holiday in 1920 — but not in the US. It was declared in Turkey, and not in June, either; it was in April. This, and other discrepancies, might suggest that the event in Chelsea wasn’t actually connected to the declaration in Turkey six decades later, but history works in mysterious ways. Look what happened after that crack I made yesterday.
In 1925 there was a World Conference on Child Welfare, and International Children’s Day was declared, but still on a different day of the year than today. That lasted until 1949, when the Women’s International Democratic Federation announced that June 1 would be the International Day for Protection of Children. Since it was 1949 and the Federation was meeting in Moscow, that version of Children’s Day was taken up by the USSR and its allies, but the countries on the other side of the Cold War wouldn’t go along with it, muttering something about “commies and their gol-durned holidays.” Not to be outdone, the UK announced another version of Children’s Day in 1954. Then in 1959, the UN adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Since that happened on November 20, Children’s Day — that is, the version we’re talking about (finally) — was set for November 20 as well.
Although the UN succeeded in designating today as Children’s Day, most of the countries that apparently voted to pass the Declaration of the Rights of the Child seem to have forgotten to actually read it. The declaration has been through at least as many versions as has Children’s Day itself, but the edition they passed in 1959 was the same as the one from the conference in the 1920s, and has five principles. They basically amount to “take care of children, feed them, don’t exploit them, and teach them what they need to learn.” Seems simple enough, but a couple of minutes perusing statistics — or visiting many parts of the world — will suggest that once again, people have failed to read the instructions.
That didn’t deter the United Nations from fixing the situation, though. I’m not talking about the situation of the world’s children; I mean the declaration. They started with those five principles, then adopted another one with seven. That rose to 10, and then in 1989 they expanded it just a bit more, called it the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and adopted it all over again. This one, which is still in effect, will definitely work, because instead of five bullet points, the convention goes on for 54 articles, some of which contain up to 12 paragraphs. The UN understands that if people don’t read the instructions, the obvious solution is more instructions.
Something like that might have been the problem on November 20, 1407 in France, when the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Orléans signed a truce. They were rivals, both members of the French royal family and both trying to become king. The conflict was getting so bad that it was starting to disrupt the royal court and from there, the country. Their uncle, the Duke of Berry, brought them to the bargaining table and got them to agree to set aside their differences. There was some sort of written agreement — a set of instructions, so to speak. Everything looked like it would work out, but then only three days later, the Duke of Burgundy — who was also known as John the Fearless — had the Duke of Orléans killed, and bragged about it. He pretty much got away with it, but never managed to ascend the throne.
Another new set of instructions was introduced on November 20, 1985, when Microsoft released Windows 1.0 to manufacturing. It wasn’t the first system to add a graphical interface on top of a text-based operating system like MS-DOS, and according to reviewers at the time, it wasn’t the best. Among others, you could get Top View from IBM, GEM from Digital Research, and Visi On from VisiCorp. They were all based on a Xerox computer called the Star, and in fact Visi On was the one that Bill Gates saw at a computer show in 1981. After the demo, he launched the Windows project — but apparently somebody didn’t read the instructions, because it took them two years to even be able to demonstrate it, and another two years to sell it.
It sometimes takes a few tries over a number of years to get something right. Windows eventually got pretty popular, but the one that succeeded wasn’t the first attempt. There have been several declarations about the rights of children, but the UN seems to still be trying to get that right. Maybe they should take heart from somebody born on November 20 who kept at something for many years until he succeeded. On top of everything else, today is Joe Biden’s birthday.
