Leave Them Alone

Clubs and offices stay servants of A.A. only while the members are free to walk away from them, and a meeting that lives inside a treatment centre has nowhere to walk. Bill W. wrote of the clubs and offices A.A. members paid for (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 28): "These are places of service; they cannot really control or govern A.A. If any of them were to become inefficient or overbearing the remedy is simple enough. The average A.A. would stop his financial support until conditions were changed." Overbearing means bossy, pushing people around. The members could always take a facility or leave it alone, because their membership never hung on it. The Long Form keeps it that way (Big Book, p. 563): "Nor ought A.A. membership ever depend upon money or conformity." Now turn it around. The meeting is held in a treatment centre, on the centre's schedule, opened by its staff. A drinker who dislikes how the centre runs things has no basket to withhold, because the centre doesn't need his dollar. If he leaves the centre alone, he leaves the meeting with it. The simple remedy Bill counted on is gone. Test it tonight: if your landlord turned overbearing, could your group pack up and meet somewhere else next week, under the same name, with the same members?