Us vs Them

My childhood was not an anxious place, though I lay in my bed, awake, thumbing my sheets like beads, wondering when the sun imploded would Russian astronauts be OK, they in their Sputniks, with their space dogs, they that chased their own tail around this water bowl we call Earth. When I was a child, in elementary school we practiced a type of protection called Duck and Cover, where we huddled under desks in case of a nuclear attack by the Russians. They were communists, had the bomb, and were evil Reagan told us from the small grave of a TV screen. In the sixties, Nixon said the same thing, and the Panthers countered with "the Viet Cong never called me nigger" With their picks like unclenched fists, with their afros like the plume of an atom bomb, they scared white and black folks alike. It is 2014, and America is still scared of the Russians and black people; now the American Dream is to be debt free, which I am not, nor may ever be, but at least I'm no longer afraid of the Russians.