Who Could Know Better

A group breaks Tradition Two the quiet way when it lets one long-sober member's say-so stand in for its own vote. Picture the business meeting. Someone proposes moving the meeting to a night when more people could come. Heads nod. Then the man with twenty years says that isn't how this group does things, and the motion dies without a vote. Nobody gave him a veto. The room handed it over. Bill W. admitted the old-timers' habit (A.A. Comes of Age): "We oldsters often construed our longer experience as a sort of vested right, even an unlimited license, to run A.A. indefinitely." A vested right is one you believe you own. They even thought they should pick their own successors, he wrote, and asked, "Who could know better than we?" The groups said no. Of the old-timer he concluded: "With all his experience and good works, there was still nothing infallible about him at all." Infallible means unable to be wrong. Long sobriety earns a hearing. It does not earn the decision. The Long Form puts the decision in one place (Big Book, p. 563): "our group conscience," the members deciding together. Today the same veto goes to whoever has run the room longest, from a member's chair or a staff desk. Test it tonight: ask what your group last dropped without a vote because somebody senior said no.