Then my love affair with Mao: la-de-la-la, la-de-la-la-lay. Grain in Silos, Hot Tamale! We drove to Florida every four years it seemed, escaping elections or Olympics. Past South of the Border, sleeping in Georgia, seeking Disney. My father described the life-impulse on those excursions: all that wanting death while chugging roses. How that afflicts the neighbor, how that defines space over coffee in Richmond, Virginia. And I breathed tribal chromosomes upon the rearview mirror and roamed to England to write my family down.

Then the case of the "Fatal Bronx Blaze...":

how can anyone turn off the electricity to an apartment with 6 children? Even if the bills due were thousands of dollars?1

Upon highlighting the case:

Allan Drury, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison, said power to the apartment had been cut off on Thursday over delinquent payments. Neighbors said the family had been using candles for light.2

But, alas:

This particular family, it seemed, fell too far behind.3
"There was significant amount of arrears on the account—well into the thousands of dollars," Mr. Drury said.3
Three brothers...were killed in the blaze...two other siblings...both girls—3

The system figures death. The system mourns its dead. The system braves the pain.

(Knocking within. Enter a porter.)

This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions... ...The owner of labour-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labour-power must perpetuate himself, "in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation."4

Hence:

Ms. Amakye brought the girl, who was covered in soot, to a bodega on the ground floor and wiped her face with a paper towel. "Then she coughed and I knew she was alive," she said.3

And, as the forts were built along the upper Hudson to stem the tide:

...the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales...5

...this just strikes me as inhumane.1

1David Hancock Turner's Facebook page, 10/27/13.
2As related by D.H. Turner's Facebook page, 10/26/13.
3"Fatal Bronx Blaze Was Caused by Candles," New York Times,
Michael Schwirtz & Alex Vadukul, 10/26/13.
4Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One: The Critique of Capitalism.
5Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood.