I was talking to an old friend of mine in this program, who lives in another state. He was telling me his story about what was going on in his group, which had violated the AA Traditions. It made me stop and back up and remember why these Traditions were founded.
These Traditions came about, as AA was starting to draw others in, who are not alcoholics. This was back a while ago. before I had come into this program. It was already being tested. And that made AA go back and think about what happened to an early group of alcoholics, who were named the Washingtonians. Back just before the Civil War. An extremely huge group of drinkers, who had begun to be plagued by different stuff other than alcohol and finally fell apart.
AA from the start was about alcoholism, but now it was being tested by other groups, so the leaders had a get together, which led them to develop rules which could and would grant these alcoholics unity.
The only reason for being a member is alcoholism. And that’s what disturbed my friend. One of the “leaders” is not very involved with sobriety, but has gotten their group allied with the government of the state, for one thing. But also involved with others.
And that got me disturbed, like I said. One of our groups, I attend on a fairly regular basis, begins its meeting with announcement that this is a closed meeting of AA, in which only alcoholism may be talked about. In fact I know a few others states I have talked to which has the same announcement at the beginning. Not only that, but attendees must have a problem with alcohol, or they have to leave.
Anyway, like I said, his full discussion opened the door for me to stop and think and write about this. I know my only reason for being in AA is about my sobriety, and that has been the same for everyone else I know going back a long time. But others came into AA because their “groups” were involved in more that they felt they needed, or not what they needed. And what often happens to AA groups with such an involvement is the group dissolving. We had a group nearby where that happened. And that got our group to begin to make a statement of what AA is about, and what the group is going to do and nothing else.