The problem with end of the world is you never can find one, when you need one
It’s just my luck or lack thereof when things have been going from bad to curse and suicide sounds like an appealing vacation destination. You just can find the end of the world when you need one to save your life. Sure when things are on the upswing and every day comes with awe and expectation, that’s when the end of the world will come like a disarming and unwelcome home invasion. Saturday May 21 2011 and a preacher with credentials of interpretive verse jousted at the windmill of apocalyptic damnation.
Nothing is ever so perfect, for some had departed this veil of tears at the daily average rate of 155,000, if it was not the end of days for all of us; it was surely the end of days for some of us.
Bill W. Wrote to Dr. Bob in 1948; the groups will eventually take over and maybe they will squander their inheritance when they get it. It is probable, however that they won’t. Anyhow, they really have grown up; A.A. is theirs; let’s give it to them.
In 1981 the GSO confirmed with the roughest kind of tabulation, a kin to counting cats, an educated guesstamation of 2,000.000 souls, if not warm body’s as regulars in the revolving doors of A.A. spin dry recovery .The world population at that time was approximately 4.529 billion. The same GSO with all things being equal, if not new and improved, now confirm 2100,000 as of January 2010 in the rooms, the corresponding world population 6.92 billion. I leaned from a banker some years hence that figures don’t lie, but liars figure. I figure something has gone awry. Surely drug and alcohol consumption has been steadily on the rise; we have declared a war on drugs, and were taught to just to say No as our brains were scrambled in the frying pan of gratuitous public denouncements.
The deep pocketed insurance companies offer reimbursement for the rehabilitation safe haven for the alcoholic addict to catch their breath take a rest with the intensive and very costly care, the birth of the all-inclusive mental health and Swedish massage spa vacation industry was invented.
Some come in shaking violently with the DT’S (delirium tremors) as their body goes into shock from demon rum exorcism, known as withdrawal. In days of Ole before rehabs were invented and hospitals having no cure, turned their collective backs, Bug juice was kept in the rooms (to help ward off the little critters that lived under the skin as every nerve ending would be screaming) It was doled out in measured and metered amounts to save the body from the shock of extinction. Often times than not, the severe alcoholic and addict required hospitalization.
The well to do found an exotic recuperative locations to get back into fighting weight and after a self-imposed exile were now again physically able to resume their foray of unabated inebriation.
Some use the Twelve Step process in rooms of collective factory warehousing. It’s a numbers game, take a number, and get in line for some, one and one with the in house psychiatrist. Some do find a stepping stone to the cure, and make it into the rooms of recovery. For the folks that aren’t willing to do the work they are doomed to the recycle rehab circuit as cash cows until the milk of human kindness in the form of insurance runs out.
A.A. has learned that acceptance and inclusion is the key to long term recovery. Give me your huddled ass’s, the infirmed and the lame the poor the rich and the fatherless child that has an itch in search of a scratch. The only requirement is a desire to stop drinking, not thinking, no matter what gender, goose or gander, religion, color or albino, sexual proclivity or abstinent as a monk, if only but for the want, if not the need to address a spiritual, physical and mental malady. The atheist, the agnostic Jew gentile, Hindu and Islam too, Buddhist, ant hills, bedknobs, and broom sticks, a Group Of Drunks, Good Orderly Direction, and less I forget Jesus who is often times elbowed out and is barely mentioned so as not to offend the tender disposition of the hard hearted malefactor to insure sufficient room for the lesser deities of man’s liberal machinations.
I am an alcoholic, with an addict chaser, or with over eating tendencies, I am also found at the dog and horse races and believe it or not I am also addicted to kitties.
The singleness of purpose has gone by the way side as we strive to be all things to all people; we fail to stand for something, so we now fall for anything. The question most profound has the solution been diluted? Have we tripped over dollars to pick up dying dimes, have we been wise with our pennies and foolish with our pounds.
The Twelve Step recoveries once the domain of A.A. has been duplicated at last count 118 times found in most every corner church with its particular twist and turns as they are quick to point out where this original gift from God as used by A.A. is flawed by virtue of their own far superior ecclesiastical interpretation.
The spin offs, rational recovery. Irrational recovery, Alano, NA CA, SLAA, SA, CODA OA, Debtors there is even a Paranoids Anonymous; the only problem is no one will tell you where they hold the meetings.
And lastly and I believe this to be critical mass, Sponsorship has been treated like a red headed step child found in a cabbage patch.The verbal tradition that worked well when the numbers were few and the sequence of events were directed and held close to the vest. Now it’s like playing elementary school Telephone, we line up in a circle, and sponsor the way your sponsor sponsored you, the way his or her sponsored them, etc, until the message has become so askew that something is added something is lost and something has been changed.
There is a fellow of some renown, Gary shares in meetings that he was told as long as he didn’t drink with his sponsee he was a good sponsor, but alas no one he has sponsored has ever been able to stay sober let alone dry. Another older gentleman legally blind named Carl, a multimillionaire with some good home spun wisdom on life especially in the acquisition and retention of long term wealth, he has never read the Big Book, nor has he worked the Steps, but offers sage advice, Carl has participated as an A.A. sponsor, a kin to shooting dice with one of  the blind mice.
The question is if you want it bad enough does it really matter who your sponsor is, or is not? Consider that your sponsor was of this ilk, and now it’s your turn up at bat to give back, not knowing much, I think I rather not, for after all is said and done I haven’t got a clue, what is a sponsor is supposed to do
I am staying sober and going to the meetings isn’t that enough? It’s when we chant keep coming back as if the meetings were the end all to recovery. Meeting makers make it alas meeting makers don’t make it, “until we have spoken with complete candor to someone and they have done the same for us, we still didn’t belong If we fail to expand our spiritual program we continue to circle the field waiting to run out of spiritual gasoline until we crash and feel the burn of self-hatred and self-loathing once more.
Sponsorship is underutilized and over looked as the prime cornerstone of our primary purpose, to stay sober, and to help the alcoholic that still suffers.
See you on the radio
RumRadio.org
Joseph
Latest Comments