From the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian security operatives used the term “wet job” to describe a bloodletting in which political foes – real and imagined – were liquidated by professional assassins and secretly buried. From Lenin’s Cheka to Stalin’s KGB, executioners used the nackenschuss—a pistol shot at the base of the skull from close range. In contrast, Vladimir Putin’s wet job in Ukraine is a grisly spectacle for all the world to see. It includes street executions and deadly missile strikes aimed at civilians who pose at all no threat to Russia, and to demoralize the population. But there is no sign that Ukrainian will is breaking under Putin’s barbarous barrage…

I’ve been searching most of my life for just the right word or words. When I was ten, I wrote a poem about how my little brother, then a toddler, quickly scooted across the floor in his small rocker. The poem may have been borderline gibberish, but my ever-vigilant Mom, always on the lookout for signs of potential in me, sent verses off to Jack and Jill magazine and somehow they got published…