Thoughts on America's 250th

Written for the Stossel in the Classroom Scholarship with the following prompt: In 2026, the United States will turn 250 years old—a major milestone for a country built on the bold ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But as we look ahead, some people wonder: Do those founding ideals still guide us today? Do they mean the same as they meant in 1776? Have we lived up to them?

250 is a number. It has 8 factors. It is a 5-smooth number (all its divisors are less than or equal to five). And it means idiot in Chinese.

Literally nothing special. In fact, it might be difficult to find a number as normal as 250. 10? Well, that's the base of the Arabic numeral system the majority of the world uses today. 26? Well, according to the Wikipedia page, there are around 25 notable facts about the number, most of which involve complex number theory that flew way over my head in the time I spent writing this intro. Even 1415926535, a seemingly random number at first glance (fun fact: it even passes the tests most statisticians use for random number generation), are taken from the ratio pi that expresses some of the simplest geometry known to our society today.

So as I was reminiscing on what the 250th anniversary of my beloved country, birthplace, and home has meant to me, I had a lot of trouble finding something noteworthy to say. I mean the question itself is a bit of an oddity: why ask teenagers barely alive for a decade and a half what 250 years of culture, development, and international warfare mean to them? Wouldn't that be better left to the elderly? The ones who actually lived a significant amount of it?

In the 250 years since the United States' founding, much has been destroyed. That ideal of allowing "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," the one everyone loves to quote, has been lost entirely. I mean philosopher John Locke's original rights of "Life, Liberty, and Property" might make more sense in a modern day USA, but those rights aren't even the full picture of his ideas: to him, property acquisition must not hurt the opportunity of others (and what's more American than buying property and renting it back to recoup the cost and then some).

Needless to say, as a teenager navigating my relationship with the US's 250th, I've been feeling a bit disenfranchised with my country. The same one that was posed as a land of opportunity, as a haven of growth and safety to my parents who scrapped their way out of India and into the American middle class (a class that perhaps encapsulates what Jefferson meant by those initial ideas). And that's what holds me back at this moment. Because I know I could not have the life I do now, fit with its luxuries and opportunity, without the US. But I feel betrayed and hurt by its current status, its utter betrayal of the literal three things it promised (a bit of an exaggeration, I know).

And I know I could write a great academic essay on this topic, a great literature review, or summary. I could even write an argument, why the US sucks! Or why it's still perfect.

But that's the easy way out. Because reconciling these two sides means so much more. It means understanding the country, and myself, in a much more emotional and meaningful way, much harder than doing a few hours of research and synthesizing it.

So let me try.

My parents came from Chennai with two suitcases, a few hundred dollars, and the kind of desperation that doesn't make it into the brochure. They didn't arrive chanting about the Declaration of Independence. They arrived because America, for all its contradictions, had built something quietly extraordinary: a functional middle class. A place where a software engineer and a nurse could, within a single generation, own a home, send their kid to a good school, and face a reality where their biggest issue is whether to cancel Netflix after another price hike. They found, if not exactly Jefferson's promise, then something close enough to live inside.

And I grew up inside it. Saturday morning tennis lessons. A bedroom to myself. A school with a robotics team and a debate coach who actually cared. These aren't necessarily glamorous things (not to understate their worth, but they aren't). But they are the result of a country that, at its best, decides to invest in its people: in roads and public universities and Medicare and a mortgage interest deduction and a thousand other policy decisions that built the infrastructure of an ordinary, middle-class life.

That is the America that worked. Not the one on the monuments or the foundational documents or even high-rise apartments facing central park. The one on the neighborhood cul-de-sac.

The grief, and it is a kind of grief, I think, of knowing that this experience is not evenly distributed is painful. The reality that the zip code you're born into determines more about your life trajectory than almost anything Jefferson could have imagined. That the same country which handed my family a ladder destroys it for others. The Black family in Birmingham. The undocumented worker in the Central Valley who picks the strawberries that I eat with my Captain Crunch and Eggo waffles. The kid in rural Texas whose school district hasn't had new textbooks since George W. Bush was president. They are living in a different country than I am, one that shares the same flag and founding ideals and almost none of the same material reality.

I'm not saying we should riot. I'm not saying the system's broken. It's just uncomfortable. The American middle class, comfortable, suburban, wifi-connected, is proof. Evidence that the American dream can work. That Jefferson and Locke's and even Rousseau's fundamental ideas can succeed. That when you give people stability, safety, and a reasonable shot, they build lives of quiet meaning and comfort. They coach Little League. They start small businesses. They show up to school board meetings and argue, passionately, about things that matter only to the small group of children being educated about a 30 minute drive from the nearest city.

The question for the next 250 years isn't whether that life is worth building. I'm not here to have a philosophical debate about whether the American middle class life we've come to know is meaningful. For the vast majority, it is. The question is whether we have the honesty and the will to extend it to others.

And it's easy to say that, hard to propose a solution. And I don't know the answer. I'm seventeen. I have no background in policy or debate. The last time I read any legal jargon was when I ChatGPTed the privacy policy for my Chess website. The adults who I and most of my generation naively relied on to figure this out have been kicking the can with more consistency than Roger Federer's forehand.

But here's what I keep coming back to, standing at the edge of 250 years with all its weight and failure and improbable beauty: the number itself means nothing. I established this at the start: 250 is unremarkable. It's forgettable. It has no substance to it, no fame, no mystique.

And maybe that's exactly what makes this milestone so important. I've always felt milestones shouldn't come from goals, but from the setbacks and mindset-shifts that led us to achieve them. The time I got rejected from 10 research programs in a row. The time Steve Jobs got fired from Apple, the company he built from nothing.

We probably won't remember the USA's 250th as a great, celebratory year. Or even a year that was enjoyable to live in. But we, right now, have the opportunity to remember it as a turning point. The point where 250 years of trying became 500 years of success. Where families like mine first became possible for everyone, not just everyone with a debt-free college degree and cushy fallback.

There's no drama in 250. No achievement. No celebration. Just possibility. The long, unfinished opportunity of becoming what we said we were.

And that's exactly what makes it so special.