America at 250

Navel gazing in a Wendy’s parking lot

It’s after dark on July 4th, 2026, somewhere on the outskirts of Lansing, Michigan. It’s my seventh day of driving across the country.

For the United States’ 250th birthday, residents of South Lansing transformed their surrounding sprawl into launchpads for rockets, fountains, mortars, and missiles of all variety. The Super Inn parking lot, the KFC drive-through entry and a nearby Ford dealership have all been turned into well-armed batteries with a limitless supply of projectiles. Sparking red, white, blue, green bursts just barely crest the trees and chain marquees that surround my position. Veterans of Verdun, Cemetery Ridge, Baghdad, or Monte Cassino would likely weep at the uninterrupted and ceaseless reports of shells and shot detonating in the night.

And it was likely the same scene across the entire country. I knew that my departure city, Long Beach, was likely enveloped in a haze of sulfurous smoke and noise. And it would be the same in Tonopah, Nevada, and in Rapid City, South Dakota, and Madison Wisconsin, and all along I-80 in West Virginia, and the same in my destination in New Haven. What a place. What a country. I sat in the parking lot for an hour just to take it all in, to watch and hear the shells burst over refined capitalism, to make my own memory of America at 250 and mull what it means to me.

Driving across the American landscape for seven consecutive days naturally begs a man to consider not only the land you hurtle through but the people, the nation, the state, that us Americans are a part of. What is America? What do we make of it? What do we make of it at 250 years? Of course, “seeing America by travelling it” is an extensive literary tradition, and these questions have already been tackled by minds far more qualified and equipped to answer them than my own. Tocqueville, Steinbeck, McMurtry, Kerouac, even the leading policy mind in China’s politburo have all sought to discover America through travels on the road, through seeing and feeling and finding whatever they see in this country. But none of them have asked these questions from a Wendy’s parking lot in Lansing.

America is the most significant and consequential group project in history. It is whatever Americans agree, or are manipulated, to see. America and whatever someone thinks America is, is paradoxically an extremely individual opinion that makes a part of a whole. So what do I see?

I see, like Huning and Steinbeck, crushing hypocrisy and potential, with hypocrisy being maybe the defining trait of the American nation. I see such immense natural beauty and absolutely depraved manufactured landscapes. Such innovation and brutally regressive thought. It is a place determined to write its history and make and remake itself through focusing on the efforts of individuals but completely and consciously ignorant of Americans, the people, that make the nation what it is and was.

Maybe, at 250, the political climate colors my view. Maybe I’m just in a mood.

And that paragraph above is why people like myself don’t answer those questions. Maybe I’ll come back and screw with it later.