Many Backgrounds

In 1939, years before any written Tradition, the Big Book already described a fellowship of people who would never have chosen each other. Chapter 2 (Big Book, p. 17): "All sections of this country and many of its occupations are represented, as well as many political, economic, social, and religious backgrounds. We are people who normally would not mix." The Foreword to the Fourth Edition is honest about how far that was from true at the time. The line, it says (p. xxiii), referred to a Fellowship "composed largely of men (and a few women) with quite similar social, ethnic, and economic backgrounds." The first members wrote a door wider than the room they were sitting in, and the Foreword says those words "have proved to be far more visionary than the founding members could ever have imagined." Visionary means seeing further than the present. What held them together, p. 17 says, was a common solution, not a common background, and the Long Form later made the wide door every group's duty. Today some rooms sort themselves anyway: a meeting for one program's graduates, where a stranger feels the chill before anyone speaks. Test it tonight: who in your town would feel out of place at your meeting, and what in the room tells them so?