I have stayed away from words,
breathless, in my grief,
for too long.
Diversity is my faith.
Equity is my hope.
Inclusion is my love.
Each breath I take is a promise
that things will be better someday.
And, they have been for a time,
in places expanding across space,
across multiple divides.
In a school, then university.
In a church, then a community.
Across a state, on national forums
Each breath inhaled the hate,
expanded and expelled love in its place.
Breaths took down barriers, created programs,
enacted policies, changed syllabi,
created courses and news ways of seeing,
new avenues of progress, new ways of being.
The backlash always came,
in drips and drabs, all the same.
But this! This! It is a fearsome game.
It is not D.E.I. which they decry.
They want to see us hold our breath
and die.
They SNAP food from the mouths of babes.
They ask the aged and disabled to work their own miracles,
heal themselves without medic-aid,
waste away, and die.
They place tariffs on those who stood at our side.
Making us all pay more for less to save their pride.
They fill their pockets with our labor,
changing coins to crypto for their greedy favor.
They extort heroes who fight to protect freedom world-wide
so that dictators and killers can be by their side.
They miss the days when the few controlled the many.
They refuse to compete, or share even one penny;
pennies earned from our labor, not theirs.
Lately, it seems we have not got a prayer.
We seldom did. But, do not despair.
What we did have was the freedom to try.
Now, our hard-won freedom to speak and act is denied.
We are being denied the right to even try.
We still have one another, and our God-given rights.
We will never allow those to be shoved aside.
And at the end of this life we shall hold hands and sigh
We tried.
We tried.
We tried!
annarino writes 
AT NOT AI
Artificial intelligence is askew.
It mispronounces names when I try to make a phone call.
I Then must make the same error to chat-up a friend,
or order a pizza or a ride.
It misspells words as I write. No text, no essay, no poem
is safe from un-related words and ideas.
Every few moments I must review or a single word
shifts all those which follow until I forget
where my thoughts were headed,
or as AI just told me my thoughts were “ceded.”
AI has ceded my thoughts to its own.
This is artificial thought- AT; not intelligent at all.
Ads pop-up to block the knowledge I would glean
from newspapers journalling the news.
Scrolling down only un-leashes new ads to view.
To reach family, friends or businesses by phone
I must mispronounce and match AI errors to get through.
AI is training me. I am not training it; or as it states
I am “trailing” it. I trail behind my own ideas and actions
to allow AI to proceed to guide me I know not where.
I soon become unaware of my own brain.
My own thoughts become lost and I, unaware.
I am betrayed in ways I cannot accept.
We underestimate the power of our minds
to override the fault lines of our brains.
AI is not artificial intelligence.
It is artificial thought.
It is a thinking process like a brain.
It is artificial thought or AT.
Like all thoughts within our brain,
our mind knows thoughts must be constrained.
Our minds modulate and regulate our thoughts.
Propriety is the hallmark of sound thought,
the peacemaker and moderator
of any civilized society.
We must correct the nomenclature of AI
and call it AT in order to keep it in its rightful place,
under our control, protecting our community.
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