Freely Discarded

The Long Form makes the groups the ones who can walk away from a facility, and capture is when that gets turned around. Clubs and hospitals, it says (Big Book, p. 564), "ought to be incorporated and so set apart that, if necessary, they can be freely discarded by the groups." The Long Form calls them secondary aids: second in line, a help to A.A. and never part of it. Freely discarded means the groups can drop them without losing anything they need. Bill W. explained why that keeps them honest. Nobody is forced to pay for them, so (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 29) "they can never dictate, nor can they stray from the main body of A.A. tradition for very long." To dictate is to give orders. Now watch it run backward. A facility offers a group its room for free, coffee included. Two years on, the group has no treasury, no other room, and a facility rule about who may attend. The group can no longer discard the facility. The facility can discard the group, and the group knows it, so it doesn't argue. Nobody captured it by force. Comfort did it, one free month at a time. Test it tonight: if the place your group meets told it to leave tomorrow, ask whether the group would still meet next week, and who would decide where.