The Card Players

A group can break Tradition Five without voting on anything, just by turning its chairs inward. Imagine the same twelve people meeting on Tuesdays for years. They know each other's children and each other's jokes. The coffee is good and the talk afterward runs late. A stranger comes in shaking, sits at the back, and leaves before anyone has crossed the room to him. Nobody did anything wrong, and nobody did the one thing the group is for. Bill W. watched the same thing happen in the first A.A. clubs. Among the growing pains he listed (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 19): "card players were impervious to any suggestion that they talk to new people". Impervious means nothing got through to them. The cards were never the problem. The problem was a room that had become about the people already in it. The Long Form gives a group "but one primary purpose—that of carrying its message to the alcoholic who still suffers" (Big Book, p. 563), and a stranger at the back of the room is the closest that alcoholic may ever come to us on his own. If he leaves without a word from anyone, the group has missed its one job. Test it tonight: count how many members spoke to the newest person in the room before the meeting began.