A Page Immune to Fire

Most of the things we commit to paper are as temporal and disposable as the pages themselves.  Notes to ourselves, yesterday's candy wrappers, a newspaper rendered irrelevant by the passing of one day.  Tomorrow's trash.

It's interesting, isn't it, that "paper" in the hyper-plural sense of the word is invaluable to the basic functioning of our whole world, but the thing itself--the page in my hands--is wholly temporary.  Worth next to nothing.
Not everything we commit to paper is so fleeting.  In fact, some pieces of paper are so important that they come to define who we are.

The Constitution of the United States was drafted in September 1787, and declared by a three-year process of ratification to be the supreme law of the land.  In our time, when a single piece of legislation can fill 2,000 pages, the Constitution is surprisingly short (in fact, it's the shortest federal constitution in use anywhere in the world), and remarkably broad.  It establishes a framework, defines the government's most basic roles, and leaves the work of specific governance to the wisdom to the discretion of the next generation's leaders.

Our Constitution is the oldest in the world.  The Union is young, but this document which holds it together has endured far longer than any like it.

Of course, our reverence for the original draft of the Constitution is largely nostalgia--the Union would still stand if, by some extraordinary confluence of events, a moth snuck its way under the shining-green bullet-proof glass.  But even this, in the larger context of history, is signficant--the Constitution exists all over the place

I carry a paper copy of the Constitution in my schoolbag.  It was given to me by a professor of whom I am particularly fond, as a great instructor and a cherished advisor.  Bearing my ill-informed margin notes and uneven hi-lites, it goes everywhere I go.  How many through story have lived under a regime so transparent as to reproduce the law for everyone to see and hold?

It's an important piece of paper.  Indeed, it is a leaf which has sustained, encouraged, and protected our collective development for over 200 years. 

By comparison, how pathetic is that post-it note sitting next to your computer?