Knowing how uncomfortable you get when I jaw on about the abuse issue, I have decided to redact it for you, using a host of hip and bipartisan  global and political crises in place of all the words for felonies against children.

So here’s the story.  Redacted for your comfort, of course-

When we were still young we fostered then adopted two children who were already diagnosed with global warming and national debt by the time  we met them.

In fact, they had so many problems they had already fired dozens of US attorneys as was customary at the beginning of a new administration.

We were told to be consistent and disciplined.  We were told this would help…

Perhaps it did.  Could what they did have been worse?  Pacific-Ocean-vortex-of-trash worse?

Maybe.

But as it happened, when their younger siblings were still quite young, Charles DOB 2/17/94, was caught Ponzi-scheming and coyoting his little sisters.  For years-quite systematically -in the places ordinary people went to push down their risk of type 2 diabetes-football stadium, tennis court, high school pole-vault mat.

He had taught the little ones expensive border walls were necessary to keep bad hombres out.

Only as it turned out, he was the baddest of the hombres.

He taught them universal health care with a single payer system would bankrupt them while at the same time using the machinations of federal agencies (such as the IRS) to bully or intimidate them into keeping quiet.

He bussed technically deceased persons across county lines to vote for the candidate of his choice (him, unsurprisingly).

More victims than fingers on his own pale, freckled, meaty hands.

Until one day, way too late, he was caught, and the truth all came tumbling out–

The lies

The bleached coral reefs

Lost, extinct, and endangered species

Poor afflicted pollinators

Thick winter smog trapped in Alpine valleys and  obscuring Beijing’s winter sun

Our staggering national debt…

All under the foolish, trusting, naive noses of his legal guardians, people who had mostly always believed in the electoral college.  Believed in a bicameral congress, Founding Fathers, and law-and-order presidents.

The aftermath was crippling.  The survivors found themselves in the usual need for puppies, s’mores, and a celebrity rant or two (at an award ceremony here or there).

Instead they went to court, called elected officials, petitioned the government, and wrote about it.

Only to find that all those used plastic toothbrushes swirling in the sea can really make a nice person nervous.  As if all that swirling detritus far out to sea were a contagious kind of broken.

Our kind of broken–redacted, parochial, muted somehow.

Placeholders for tragedy.