To Keep One Man

A group breaks Tradition One when it turns the Long Form's order around and puts one member's comfort ahead of the room. The order is plain (Big Book, p. 563): "Hence our common welfare comes first. But individual welfare follows close afterward." Here is how it gets turned around. The group has outgrown its room, and newcomers stand along the back wall. A bigger hall is free on the same night. The group's best-known member, twenty years sober, says he won't follow. He likes the small room; he says so at the business meeting and hints he will go somewhere else. Nobody wants to lose him, and the vote goes his way. Within a year the people who stood at the back have stopped coming, because there was never anywhere to sit, and the group is twelve old friends. Nobody was cruel. The group arranged itself around one man, and the next drunk was the one given up. The essay that opens the Traditions in the Big Book says what a group is for (Big Book, p. 561): "We alcoholics see that we must work together and hang together, else most of us will finally die alone." Most of us, not the best known of us. Test it tonight: ask whose comfort your group arranges itself around, and look at who is standing at the back.