America’s 250th birthday celebration includes fireworks and speeches and parades. Politicians invoke the founders and the flag. But I keep thinking about six 20th-century thinkers and leaders who spent their lives studying this country, warned us about what was going wrong — and what they might say today.
Jane Jacobs, the urbanist who watched cities from her window and saw an urban intelligence that planners missed. E.F. Schumacher, the economist who told the West that bigger was not better. Wendell Berry, the farmer who has spent decades insisting that a country disconnected from its land is a country eating itself. Buckminster Fuller, the inventor who believed we already had everything we needed to solve our problems. John F. Kennedy, the president who told Americans their country’s power meant nothing without purpose. Martin Luther King Jr., the preacher who told a nation its wealth was worthless without justice.
They came from different disciplines, but they shared a single warning: When the distance between the people making decisions and the people living with consequences grows too large, the system loses the ability to correct itself. Jacobs called this mass amnesia. Schumacher cautioned about the loss of the human factor. King called it the silence of good people. Different names for the same catastrophe.
At 250, that catastrophe is here. Five platform corporations — Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple and Microsoft — perform functions once distributed across thousands of independent businesses. The average American cannot afford a home in the average city. We spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on defense while nearly 36 million Americans lived in poverty in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Our national infrastructure earned a grade of C from the American Society of Civil Engineers for 2025. The country that launched the Peace Corps now struggles to staff it. The country that went to the moon cannot agree on whether to fund its own bridges. King’s three interconnected evils — racism, materialism and militarism — are not relics of the 1960s. They are the operating system.
Little things go a long way
The temptation is to conclude that nothing you do matters. Every one of these thinkers would reject that. Fuller made the best argument: You do not have to move the whole system. You have to find the smallest intervention that creates the largest change — what he called the trim tab — and move it.
So here are some trim tabs, drawn from each of them. Walk your neighborhood with your eyes open — Jacobs understood her city because she watched it every day. Attend one local government meeting — school board, zoning board, park district — just to listen. Most Americans have never attended a single meeting of the bodies that govern their daily lives. Learn the names of five neighbors you don’t currently know.
Move one regular purchase from a national platform to a local source — your coffee, your bread, your books. Support a credit union instead of a megabank. Schumacher’s question about any technology or institution was always the same: Does this serve me, or do I serve it?
Grow something. Berry’s point is not that everyone should be a farmer, but that growing food reconnects you to the most fundamental relationship in human life — the relationship between people and soil. Cook a meal from scratch with ingredients you can name. Repair something instead of replacing it. Every time you repair instead of replace, you are refusing the disposable economy and practicing the economics of care.
Put purpose over politics
Teach a skill to someone younger. Fuller understood that the transfer of practical knowledge between generations is the most powerful technology in human history, and it requires no subscription. Learn one practical skill you currently pay someone else to do.
Volunteer — regularly, not once. Kennedy’s insight was that Americans have capacity, and using it for others is not a sacrifice but a purpose. Run for something, or support someone who does — school board, library board, village trustee. Build a relationship with someone whose life experience differs from yours — King’s beloved community begins with the decision that no one in your orbit is invisible.
And talk to your children about what a country is for. Not about politics — about purpose. What should a nation do with its power? What does it owe its people? These are the questions Kennedy asked in his inaugural, King asked from the pulpit, Berry asks from his field. They are the questions a country turning 250 should be asking at the kitchen table.
The U.S. is not finished. It was never supposed to be finished. The founders called it an experiment, and experiments do not end — they continue, or they are abandoned. The question on the country’s 250th birthday is whether we are still running it.
Start with one thing. This week.
Matt Overeem is a writer based in Glenview, with 34 years of experience in public infrastructure and technology assessment.