Who Knew I Could Still Cry Over America

My cynical Gen-X heart clearly runs on pure unleaded hope

5 min read

1 hour ago

Last week I read the book Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service.

It’s a slim volume of essays, compiled by bestselling author Michael Lewis (The Blind Side; The Big Short), about the work that some people employed by the federal government do.

It, and its version of America, made me cry.

Desperately trying to make readers

I am all kinds of depressed about the fact that neither of my kids likes to read, or will read anything by choice other than Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Minecraft books.

So when the new year started, I had big plans for reading to them as they ate breakfast — just snippets of any kind of good prose I could find — for the ten or so minutes they take to inhale their eggs and toast.

The book Who Is Government? is actually a series of character portraits. Each essay/chapter focuses on a federal employee and the job they perform, but the emphasis is definitely on the person, why they chose the work they are doing, and, tangentially, the good that their work is doing in the world.

I enjoyed the first chapter, about Christopher Mark, a man who works for the…