Bill Whittle's Afterburner: 'Ghosts of Independence'

From Bill's blog, "IMPERISHABLE":

The Declaration of Independence – the foundational “why” of why we are here – is faded, irreparably faded, and lost to us forever. And the sight of it filled me with despair. Not only for the lost document. I became overwhelmed with despair because the loss of the words on the parchment beneath the glass at my fingers felt a perfect analogy for the fading of those words and ideals from the pages of society. Like the ghost signatures on this pale surface, so many of these ideals are faded and worn — almost invisible, today.

And the instant I had that thought I had another. This document, this piece of parchment, is unreadable. So I resolved to make a copy: just for me.

I wrote it out, by hand, using a four-dollar fountain pen I got at the drug store and copied onto regular printer paper. I could have typed it – heck, I could have texted it – but wanted to write it out by hand. I wanted it to hurt a little.

And I would urge you now – I would urge each of you listening to this today, especially those of you with children – to help me recover this document. We can’t get that ink back on that paper. But we can do something better. We can put new ink to fresh paper, and copy down once again those words exactly as they were written. We can whisper them aloud as we write them – as I did – and through writing them anew on the page we will inevitably write them anew on our hearts, as fresh and as clear to our eyes and our souls as they were the day that ink dried in that hall in Philadelphia.

A piece of parchment is a piece of old skin. A flag is a piece of colored cloth. A man groans in agony, dying in a dirty room. None of that matters. Not here. Not in America.

For above and beyond faded ink, and strips of colored cloth, and whimpers of pain are ideals that come once in all of history. Once. Never again.