Preoccupied With Their Own Affairs

A group's freedom has a back door, and A.A. nearly lost its own office through it. As the Fellowship grew in the 1940s, the New York office answered the letters, printed the literature and kept the directory of groups, work done for every group at once. Bill W. wrote (A.A. Comes of Age): "Many groups, preoccupied with their own affairs, failed to help us at all. Less than half of them contributed anything." Book sales covered the gap: "Without this book income we would have folded up entirely." Each of those groups was within its rights, because nobody can make a group give. But the Long Form does not end on a group's rights. Its last sentence (Big Book, p. 563): "On such issues our common welfare is paramount." The issues are the ones that touch neighbouring groups and A.A. as a whole, and an office that answers the drunk's letter is one of them. A group that runs its own meeting well while the line that brings the next drunk in goes unpaid has read half of Tradition Four. Today the back door looks the same: a healthy basket that never goes past the group's own rent and coffee, while the phone line, the meeting list and the office are left to someone else. Test it tonight: ask where your group's money goes after the rent.