By the time you read this, we are fifteen days and some hours too late. By the time you read this, Lillian Milán is already dead and buried, victim of the daily little violences carried out by our tax-funded bureaucratic neglect.

We arrive more than half-way into the story because, even though there's a mother and wife missing, the bureaucratic violence that killed Ms. Milan is still going strong.

You don't need to go to New Orleans to witness the havoc and devastation of our government's willful neglect.

All you need to do is take the train to 140 Moore Street in Brooklyn.

Every day between May and October, from noon to ten or eleven at night, an ice cream truck drives through my neighborhood. It has all the persistence and inevitability of rats in the subway, with the considerable added aggravation that it's loud and pollutes the air.

Of all retail platforms in New York City, the common ice cream truck is perhaps the most inefficient and the most degrading to the common interest. This particular example, which I suspect is common enough elsewhere in the Five Boroughs, is everywhere in the summer, advertising its presence through an incredibly loud, endlessly repetitive tinny jingle broadcast from speakers inevitably turned up to full volume. In my neighborhood, if it's summer, you'll get at least ten hours of the Mister Softee jingle at full blast during daylight hours.