Two Lists for a 250th Birthday

This morning I made two lists. It's the country's 250th birthday, and it seemed like a fair way to mark the occasion — a birthday card in one hand and a punch list in the other. One list is things I love about the United States. The other is things we could improve in the next 250 years. I didn't spend a lot of time or thought making the lists. Both came fast, which tells you something about how much material there is in each direction. I didn't rank anything. I'm serious about all of it — the everyday niceties and the heavy stuff alike — and I'm not going to tell you which matters more, because a list made on a holiday morning is allowed to hold both without apologizing for either.

The loves, in no particular order: diner breakfast, which I will defend against the breakfast of any other nation. Free refills, and ice in the glass without having to ask. Big weird roadside attractions — there are at least two towns, one in Kansas and one in Minnesota, locked in a decades-long dispute over which has the world's largest ball of twine, and I love that we're the kind of country where that's a rivalry. Yard sales. Gas station snacks eaten in a parked car somewhere along an interstate. Public libraries. National parks. Pronghorn, which are cute. Jazz.

The improvements, also in no particular order: Affordable quality healthcare. Abundant housing. Enough real competition to break up the political party duopoly. Ending gun violence. An immigration system that actually functions. The end of tipping culture, daylight savings time, and imperial units, none of which anyone would invent today. Rebuilt civic trust. Bidets in every bathroom.

Some people say you have to pick a list. Love the country or indict it. But the more time I spend away from screens, the more I notice that this choice mostly exists on screens. Online, America is divided. But at the yard sale, at the diner counter, at the trailhead, nobody asks which list you keep. The country I actually move through is far less polarized than the one I scroll through, and I've stopped treating the scrolled version as the real one.

You don't make a repair list for a house you've given up on. You make it for the house you intend to keep living in. The second list might be the more devoted document of the two, because nobody who writes it will live to see it finished. A 250-year repair list is a promise you can only make to generations you'll never meet.

Both lists mention inventions. We invented the airplane, the integrated circuit, GPS, jazz, rock & roll. We also invented napalm, leaded gasoline, the engagement algorithm, and the financial instruments that took down the housing market. I'm not going to squeeze a lesson out of that. It's just true. Two hundred fifty years is enough time to make a lot of things, and we made all of these.

Here's something else I noticed sitting with the lists: some of the things I love most are systems. The public library is a big, unglamorous, tax-funded bureaucracy, and it's one of the most beloved institutions in American life. The national parks are a system. The interstates that make the road trip possible are a system. Even the free refill is a kind of policy — somebody decided the default should be generosity, and everybody got used to living in a country where at least the soft drinks are abundant.

But I think a key difference is who the systems work for. The library, the parks, the interstate — those work for us. They were built to bring out what's best in us: curiosity, awe, the itch to drive for hours or days to see a ball of twine. Too many of the systems on the second list work against us, or more honestly, for someone else — tuned to produce what's best for privatized profits rather than what's best for the people the system is supposed to support. Nobody loves a system that treats them as a margin to be optimized. Everybody loves the library.

I made these lists this morning, so I won't pretend to have a theory of America. What I have is a direction. Build new things for people — the library and the parks are proof that we'll love an institution that treats us generously, and we've mostly stopped making new ones. Protect the machinery that filled the good half of the invention list: the labs, the universities, the garage tinkerers, the people who move here from everywhere else to make things. And fix our instruments, because a country that gets its picture of itself from engagement-optimized feeds is trying to steer with a compass that points at whatever is most upsetting.

Underneath all three is the same question, the one sitting between the birthday card and the punch list: whether we'll spend the next 250 years building systems that work for us — that bring out what's best in us, instead of extracting what's most profitable from us.

If you want a reason to believe it's possible, it's already on the table: a glass the waitstaff keeps filling without being asked. We do generosity by default every day. We just do it small. The next 250 years are for doing it big.