Three fingers are better than one

One doesn't get too many three-finger salutes in Florida, though there are some one-finger salutes depending upon traffic conditions. Sometimes Trump bumper stickers and a faded blue U.S. flag waving from the back of a pickup truck will tempt the raising of a finger but liberals tend to hide in the Python . . . er. . . Sunshine State. And there are lots of guns.

I didn't expect a one-finger or three-finger salute when I put a Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine) sticker on the back window of my pickup truck. Even among the Trump minions and gun toting libertarians, I don't think there were many Putin supporters around though Russians do vacation in the Tampa Bay area when Miami seems out of reach.

Imagine my surprise when one day a car pulled alongside me, matching my speed, which caught my attention, and offered up three fingers. It took me a few seconds but then I knew he was flashing the "three-finger salute," a gesture mimicking the Ukrainian national emblem, the trident (Tryzub), which is also on my sticker. Often done with the fingers spread out rather than pressed together (not like the Boy Scout salute), it's a symbol of Ukrainian independence and nationalism.

Though the experience gave me assurance I wasn't alone in my opinion, I didn't attach the sticker for any other reason than support for the country. From Eastern European stock, being pro-Ukrainian was in my DNA.

The death, the maiming, destruction and kidnapping done by Russian troops during the nearly four years since their invasion were experiences seared into my mother's soul. As a teenager in Lodz, Poland, she saw Jews rounded up and placed in the Lodz Ghetto, of which 21 percent of the population died of starvation, before being shipped off to extermination camps. She saw non-Jewish Polish citizens treated harshly for any act of defiance. She felt constant terror, manifesting itself when she was taken off the street to be shipped off as a slave laborer until the war's end.

My mother knew the Russians had been allied with Hitler, an unforgivable sin. She could forgive, as hard as it was, Ukrainians for the Volhynian and East Galician massacres in which Polish villages were raided by Ukrainians nationalists. She could not forgive two warlike nations, Germany and Russia, led by megalomaniacal men intoxicated with power, void of empathy, where death is a vicarious emotion, to attack a country, a land, made ready to be craved up like a bloody slice of meat to be consumed at leisure.

Decades later the Putin-Trump summit became like a cocktail party before a geopolitical banquet later. Trump was the main server having been played by Putin like the head waiter, reviving the speculation that the Russian has something over Trump, maybe as dangerous as what Epstein may have had — not money, not women, but a severe humiliation that strips away his falsehood of masculinity. Trump fears Putin, which is dangerous not only to Ukraine but the United States.

Now that Putin has wiped his bloody shoes on Trump's red carpet, war and the threat of it widening remains. Nothing has been solved. It has been made worse. All the reporters, all the pundits, all the news media outside of Ukraine tumbled in a word fest of nothing, treating news like a disappearing cloud formation that will mean little once gone.

The burning question remains: What will be left when Putin and Trump are done.