Rocking the Raft

A group can disagree as hard as it likes; it breaks Tradition One when a fight hardens into two camps and the newcomer is caught between them. Bill W. compared the early days to a crew adrift in the Pacific after their plane went down (A.A. Comes of Age): "Nobody dared rock that raft, lest they all perish." Lest means for fear that. Then he admitted: "But some of our sick and careless members did rock the raft, and that scared us to death." Here is how a group rocks it now. The business meeting votes to move to a bigger room, nine to six. The six don't let it go. It comes back at the next business meeting, then at the coffee urn, then in shares. By spring the six have opened a meeting of their own, same night, same hour, two doors down. A new group is no harm; A.A. grows that way. The war is the harm. The man who came in that winter gets two phone numbers, and each one warns him about the other. The Long Form never asks a group to stop arguing. It asks what comes first (Big Book, p. 563): "Hence our common welfare comes first." Test it tonight: ask whether any old vote in your group is still being fought in front of the newcomers.