Why Money and Spirituality Do Not Mix – George G.

I'm a grateful alcoholic. My name is George. I'm sitting here thinking about, you know, what I've been doing every week and it's been starting off with a review of the tradition we just finished and I've be reading the long form of the traditions and I think a lot of times we miss a lot by not reading the forms of the traditions. I think they tell me more about the whole spiritual purpose that that we talk about in the 5th tradition, and then we talk about in this 6th tradition it goes a little further about how we don't divert ourselves from money, property, and prestige. And I'm really focusing on 5, 6, and 7 because it's going to lead us right to 8. You know, it talks about in 6th Tradition that money, property, and prestige we shouldn't be involved in because it is going to divert us. In 7th Traditions it talks about money but it also talks about spirituality and how do we mix money and spirituality. and eight, we're going to go really back to six in a lot of ways, and we're going to be talking a lot about what AA is and what AA isn't responsible for. And we'll talk about that in a minute. But in the seventh tradition, when we read the long form, it says the AA groups themselves ought to be fully supported by voluntary contributions of their own members. We think each group should achieve this ideal. That any public solicitation of funds using the name of alcoholics is highly dangerous. Whether by groups, clubs, hospitals, or other outside agencies, the acceptance of large gifts from any source or contributions carry an obligation, whatever is unwise. Then to review with much concern those AA treasuries which continue beyond prudent reserves. To accumulate funds for not stated day a purpose experience often warns us that nothing can solely destroy our spiritual heritage and of frugal disputes over property money and territory authority and that's in the seventh tradition so they're going back and telling you watch out for that in tradition seven as they do in tradition six and I think of a story which I didn't tell last week in the seven tradition there There used to be a guy who's no longer with us. His name was Bill Potter, and there's someone in this room who'll remember Bill Potter. Bill Potter used to go to a group up the road here and he used to put a dollar in the basket and there was a time when we would, there was a movement to make it $2 for the basket because of inflation, but he used put a $1 in the bucket and 10 cents. And last week I told the story of Bill going in his pocket and pulling out a 50 cent piece and a 10 cent piece and he threw in the 10 cents And I used to watch him do this with a dollar every week, and Bob Welsh was alive at the time. And I'd say to Bob, why is he doing that? He says, why don't you go over and ask him? Bill was around long enough to have been around during the time of all the early-day stuff, like the early times stuff. And what happened is that he remembers the story of Bill being Randy Ellison giving the $5 to the guy in the morning because he was coming back from a drunk, And the club was, the group, the 24th Street Clubhouse, which was a group, was going to be thrown out of their place because they didn't have enough money to pay the rent and they asked for extra money. And Bill took that $5 and he realized his grandiosity on that level was going get him in trouble. So what he ended up doing was reaching and putting a dime in. And Bill Potter, in remembrance, to remember not to be grandiose, took that extra dime every meeting he went to and put a dollar and snuck 10 cents in the basket in memory of Bill. and I tell that story because that's a story that caught my attention and history is very important especially when it comes to the traditions we do a lot with history and the seventh tradition is where we do mix spirituality and money, it's the only place we talk about the mixture of the two we talked about Ebby last week taking some money to get from New York to go to Brooklyn on the subway to carry the message to Bill and that's really the seventh tradition And in my favorite little one, the 12 Steps Illustrated, I call it my little coloring book because I like the cartoons in it. And it's real simple reading. And if you read the five paragraphs, it really concises what the seventh tradition is about. It talks about being practical. You know, last week when I talked about the seventh edition, I was breaking it into the three categories that are dangerous to us. That's when we accept large gifts from within, when we get involved in grandiosity, and when we stay cheap. And it's all about balance. Seventh Tradition really talks about balance, and there's so many different ways we carry the message. It says experience shows us that AAs as a whole needs to be self-supporting and independent. When we're drunks, we ask for handouts. There's people, there's a guy who's no longer around whose name I'm not going to mention in case he's still alive. He used to come in and play The Room, we used to say. used to come in and try and get money from everybody and they'd go out and get drunk and then go to another group and get money from everyone, go out, and get drunk. And sooner or later, he wears out his welcome. But there are people that still will reach out for that. There were whole groups that got drunk over situations like that. And we talk about it in other traditions. And it tells us a part of our personal recovery came from making ourselves into responsible human beings. I have a responsibility, not only a financial responsibility at Alcoholics Anonymous. I definitely have a spiritual and I have a moral obligation that I believe, that's something that I grew in here, that I have responsibility to the meetings, to the people, and to my own recovery. And that was real hard for me at the beginning. So passing the basket at meetings is our way of making our responsibility for the work AA does, our own contribution, not only supports the group, it supports general headquarters, the intergroup, and it breaks out into districts and areas and all kinds of different things, that that dollar gets split real before. and you know and when you get involved in other levels of service you see where that money really goes to and we don't really give too much because we keep a prudent we stay prudent and you some of the ways we were trying to make money is the writing of the books and all the stuff that was going on and we'll get into that in the eighth tradition the law of money has meant led many of us astray talks about that and when we get to this tradition a which we're gonna go right into in a minute there's a lot of that but I always go over that checklist in Tradition 7 that comes out of the AA checklist on the traditions. So here's what it says in the short form. It says every group ought to be fully self-supporting and declining outside contributions. The reason we don't want outside contributions is we don' t want anybody to tell us how we're supposed to behave because once you tie money to it, whether it be a facility such as a church, which if they turn around the church gives you room for nothing and they say well we want the priest to come in and speak at the beginning of the meeting to talk about going to church meetings that is not acceptable to alcoholics anonymous so we don't affiliate we will cooperate and let them let them know that if there's something we can do to make the church a little nicer on our own but we need to pay our rent and you know there was a time we couldn't pay the rent so there's a lot of battles that went on you know because landlords wanted their money so here is the questions that the checklist brings and then we'll move into a honestly now how do i Do all I can to help AA, my group, my central office, the GSO, to remain self-supporting. Could I put a little more money into the basket on behalf of a new guy who can't afford it yet? How generous was it when I was tanked in the ballroom? When I came in here, I couldn't afford a big book, and I was told by Bob, how long are you here, three days? You forgot how to steal? There's one, go get one. And then when I started getting a job, he says, you know that big book you took? Now when anybody comes in your room and they need one, you need to buy them one. And that's how I started paying back and making amends. Actually, I was doing more than that. I was trying to support my group at the time and didn't even know it. Should the grapevine sell advertising space to book publishers and drug companies so they could make a big profit and become a bigger magazine in full color and cheaper prices per copy? That would be nice in theory if we were a business, but we're Alcoholics Anonymous It's not really something we would want to do. If the GAO so runs short of funds some years, would it be okay to let the government subsidize AA groups in hospitals and in prisons? That's a nice thought. We will affiliate. If we don't affiliate, we will cooperate. So the answer to that one would be no as well. Is it more important to get a big AA collection from a few people than a small collection in which most members participate? I know of a guy who used to walk into the room every now and then to show how well he was doing. He would take a big bill and put it in the basket, and the group would always remind him because they all knew who was doing it and say, listen, we don't want a big deal. We'd rather you gave your fair share. Because a big build, why is he giving a big meal? Because he wanted to show everybody how much he was giving and he wasn't really getting any recovery. He was just putting a big amount of money in the bucket. And somebody said, if you want to put that much money in your basket, put $1 in each basket and go to 100 meetings this week. You can do that, but we don't take $100 bills. It's not about grandiosity. So I was thinking of that story and that experience of watching that guy. I don't know if that guy ever made it, but I learned about the moderation and balance in that one. As Group Treasurer reports, an important AA business, how does the treasurer feel about it? Some things that we hear we don' t want to listen to and I think we need to listen too at all. how important is my recovery how important in my recovery is the feeling of self-respect rather than the feeling of being always under obligation for charity received somebody was talking I was talking to somebody the other day about you know feeling obligated I can never pay the obligation I feel to alcoholics and arms no matter how much I give back and I can ever pay the obligation to the people who was before me that spent the time with me to give me what they gave me and that's just the way I believe so my obligation is not a financial obligation it's more of giving what was so freely given to me so again there's where that spirituality and the money mix so getting from tradition 7 we're going to move into tradition 8 and tradition 8 is rich in history one of the people we're gonna talk about tonight is Clarence Snyder and you know we were such good dope fiends and we'll talk about ClarenCEnyder we're talking about Bill and we're actually those are two of the stories and they're very good stories to learn about what we do and don't do. We're going to talk about affiliation or cooperation and how the 8th tradition is very mixed up with anonymity breaks. They're really not violations of the 8TH tradition. And that's a real big thing, and it's written really well. It's written in the 12 and 12 really well, it's in language of the heart, the Clarence Snyder thing comes out of the language oftheheart, and in A Comes of Age, which is one of my favorite books, there's a lot in it. It says, Tradition 8 says that alcoholics and honors should remain forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers. What is a special worker comes the first question. It was Bill and Bob's special workers. They did a lot of service for Alcoholics Anonymous, but were they special workers? And that was where this thing started, way back with Bill and Bob. And we went back to an earlier tradition when Bill had the great idea when Charlie Towns offered him a job at Towns Hospital, and I told that story here. On his way home, he said that labor is worthier than his hire. And he believed that he should be paid as a lay therapist. And he had these great ideas and he was going to take Lois out of the kitchen and out of working at the store she was working at and move things forward. And that was where Bill was with that. And the group said no, Bill. And the Group Conscience spoke. It said no Bill, we will not settle for the good in spite of the best. we need the best. The good is not good enough, the best Is it moral? Is it ethical? Yes but for you to do that it would not be appropriate so Bill listened to the group and he did. Now I was back in tradition too a loving God as he's expressed himself now we're on tradition 8 and it's going to come up again and it says alcoholics and non-alcoholics will never have a professional therapeutic class we have gained some understanding on the ancient words freely we receive freely we give. For our purpose, we have discovered that to the point of professionalism, money and spirituality do not mix. We do not decry professionalism in other fields. We accept the sober fact that it does not work for us. Every time we have tried to professionalize our 12th step, the results have been exactly the same. Our singleness of purpose is defeated. And that's really important. If we're trying to get money for trying to help somebody, either they don't get sober or we get drunk. And I've watched that happen, and there's a lot of people in this room that I know that have seen that happen over and over and again. So we don't professionalize our 12-step work. And we talked about at the beginning, we talked About how the group conscience, when he wanted to work for Charlie Towns Hospital as a professional therapist, Bill said he was wrong and the group was right. And that was a very humbling thing for him because he was not making any money at all. And in the early game, he discovered that under no conditions should an AA be paid for taking or carrying the message to somebody else, person-to-person and face-to‑face. And, you know, it gets a little clouded when we get into the therapeutic area, and we're going to talk about that, or when you work in a treatment center or if you work at a hospital and what a special work is and what are service committees. and, you know, we get really kind of confused. I know I was for a very long time, but the longer I stay here, the more clear that message gets, just like the clearer a lot of things get the longer they stay here. And it says, this was out. If professionalism invaded us at that level, we would be doomed. But the issue of professionalism had other aspects. For years, we've been trying to figure out what in AA was professionalism and what was not. The problem arose out of the need for paid workers in our service centers. The need for people who would do the jobs that volunteers could not or would not do. Were service workers professionals, or were they not? And that was an issue, and that was the big issue at the time. I want to tell a story about the fireman, Fred, Tom, Tom the firemen. Tom the Fireman came out of an institution in Rockland County. He's written about it in a couple of places. And what ended up happening is Bill had a great idea because what they used to do is get the keys out a lot. They let a lot of drunks stay at the 24th Street Clubhouse. People didn't clean up after themselves. So the old timers or the people that were at the group stopped cleaning up after them. There was drunks laying around when people came in the morning, and this guy Tom just got out of an institution. And Bill suggested that maybe we'll give him a little room. we'll set him up with a nice little place and he can make the coffee and he an look after the drunks that are drunk, sleeping on the floors clean up the room, take care of the bathroom and they really wanted a janitor and the story is in the big book it's in the 12 and 12 and the storytelling here is really a great way it was laid out and I really like the way the story's laid out in A Comes of Age the first situation that I remember came up at the clubhouse on 24th Street volunteers had painted the place and shined it up were answering the telephones, and that was fine. When they went home, they handed out numerous keys to benefit the night owls, but some of the owls had gotten stewed and lying around the place in all kinds of conditions and in all kind of hours. This was not good. These volunteers also got very tired of sweeping out the place, so they stayed dirty most of the time. Plainly enough, we needed a caretaker. Now it was something that they saw they needed, and a lot of us volunteer when we do a room like this particular room where people clean up after. There's people that will actually make sure this room is cleaner than when we first walked in the way I was taught when I got here always leave the room cleaner than what you found coffee pots are cleaned, things are put away chairs are straightened out, all the dirt on the floor is taken care of, any coffee spills and whatnot are mopped up and then you leave and whoever's going to follow in this room takes care of it as well but this was a group so they approached this guy Tom who was a fireman who recently sprung out of the Rockland Asylum. We were shrewd. We already knew that Tom had a pension as a fireman, so we said to him, how would you like to come over, Tom, and live at the club? Nice room for you there? Tom said, what's the angle? Well, Tom will give you a nice room and you can look after the place. Tom said seven days a week. Yep. What am I supposed to do? Well, Tom, you ought to make the coffee and you know that if the drunks out there get too bad, you throw them out, you sweep up the place, do this seven days a week. Said Tom, what you guys want is a janitor. All right, we said, sure, we want a janiter. Well, said Tom, ain't you going to pay me? That's really a very big shot for us. Being a janator, am I going to get paid for this? oh no we said that'll make you a professional this is Alcoholics Anonymous we must not mix money with spirituality okay said Tom no money, no work real simple don't want to pay me for the work I'm going to do I'm not going to it I'm doing my 12 step work for free but if you're going to I'll do my 12 steps for free but if your going to have me here as a janitor you're gonna pay me see lots of us work here any time earning money. But believe it or not, we actually hang with the old guy and got him down to the last cent we could for doing a dirty job. Bill Penny pinched him all the way down, but he did get paid for the job. And it was real important because that was the start of things. Now I can tell you when I got in here there was a room, there was another guy who's no longer with us and Joe the carpenter. There was another guys an electrician who's still with us and there was couple of people and the room was being moved from the Veritas building, name of the group doesn't matter, was being moved from the Verita building to behind Nichols store. People who know that room know what we're talking about and what ended up happening was that a bunch of us that were members of Alcoholics Anonymous who had special fields did the work but we got paid for the work we did and we always believed in Alcoholics Andonymous and we still do it's better to give the work to someone within if they're available because they're one of us, than to go outside and just hire a contractor. If there was stuff that we needed outside service, we hired outside service people to take care of that. But that's what we did. We worked within. And that's the inside of AA stuff. There's inside of AAA, and there's also outside of AA. There's stuff that's involved in this tradition. But old Tom was right. In order for AA to function, we had to hire some help. in that length, in the breadth of AA among us at that time there was 2,000 or more. We have today only 300 members and we're talking about way back in the 50s when this book was written hired help all around and here's what we pay for. We include cooks who fry hamburgers in clubs, janitors sweeping out places, women answering telephones in our central offices. It also includes Bill who once wrote some literature for us We paid a royalty for being a writer. That is where the line finally fell. Face-to-face treatment of a drunk, no money ever. Face-To-face Treatment of a Drunk, No Money Ever. And that needs to be repeated. I can get called in the middle of the night, and I have been, and I've gone different areas and grabbed somebody and did 12-step work. I didn't ask for gas money. I didn' t ask for the coffee money. I didn''t ask for time. I sat at a diner all night long with a wet drunk or neither the other person because that was 12-step work. Now, that was inside of Alcoholics Anonymous. As working in the field on the outside and getting called to do work, am I carrying a message or am I carry the message of the facility I worked at? What I am doing is I am carrying the facility of the message. So when you work in a treatment center, and there are people I know in here that work in treatment centers, when they get a phone call and what they do or what they should be doing, I shouldn't tell anybody what they'd do, But what they should be doing, or what I was taught to do, is that when I work in a treatment center, what I'm doing is making 12-step work possible for another alcoholic when I send someone to a meeting. My job is to send people to other places when I worked for a facility if they needed to get to a meeting, or if they need to go to a hospital, or they needed to go through a treatment center. What I'm there to do is to facilitate the ability of someone else to carry that message. I am being paid by that treatment center to carry that message or that hospital or that service committee to let someone else do that 12-step work, which gets really tricky because what hat am I wearing? Am I wearing a treatment center hat? And I want to talk about a clubhouse that's up in Broward that I used to work at. I used TO sit at the counter, and it's a club house, and they had many different fellowships. and somebody would come to the counter and they have a family member who had a problem and you're sitting at the counter I work for that club I was a cashier at the club selling literature making coffee and sodas and I was getting paid an hourly rate and somebody said they had a problem I did not say excuse me I can't ring the cash register anymore let me sit down and talk to you and do some 12 step work what I did is I would say well there's an Al-Anon meeting if somebody had a problems with a spouse who wasn't an alcoholic that came in and said I needed some help with my husband or my son or my daughter, I would send them to Al-Anon or the other fellowship. It was a different name. It was Naranon and send them into that so they can get help to their spouses who was alcoholics or an addict. You had other fellowships. If somebody had an eating problem. So you had many fellowships within there. And as someone who worked behind the counter, my job was to facilitate them to a 12-step program that was what they were looking for, basically. And it was not to carry 12-step work. So I have to be careful what hat I'm wearing in the job I was on. And in the Job I Was On was strictly to be paid to work at that facility. When it came to 12-stepped work, nobody tells me how to do my 12-step work. I'm very much like Tom in here. I was taught a certain way. I carry a message a certainway. To me, it's about the steps. It's about traditions. and it's about the concepts, which is another 12 principles we don't talk about a lot. And those are things that are very important. That's how I started to carry the message. Then it says, even after Tradition 8 was thus established in principle, it took many more years to work out its application. There were all sorts of borderline cases, and there was always hot debate over them. I want to talk about one of the hot debates. One of the hottest debates was Clarence Snyder. They invited Bill and Bob to come speak at a place in 1940, and what ended up happening is when they got here, and I don't know if Bill was tipped off but I believe he was because not very many people in the early days would walk around carrying a certified copy of our accounting, yet Bill did have that with him, and the rumors had it that Bill was getting rich with the help of the Rockefellers by taking the big book profits for himself. Bill's own description of what happened, a few AAs set up a dinner in a city where rumors had the largest currency. Dr. Bob and I were invited to speak. The dinner was not too well attended and it was good cheer seemed mysterious lacking. When the festivities were over and the chairman and all the group in the town conducted Bill and me into the hotel parlor. There they produced an attorney and a certified public accountant. They had been hearing awful stories about the foundation, they heard that the book Alcoholics Anonymous was making vast sums of money and Dr. Bob and I shared in the profits, 64 thousand dollars a year it was the year before they believed that I, a Wall Street promoter had a truck right up to John T. Rockefeller's strong box and persuaded him to fill it with coin for me and my friends. The Integrating Committee let us know that the members from their city had met one of the trustees in New York and it was said that he had confirmed these appalling reports. This incredible but more than half-hearted fantasy hit Dr. Bob and me quite hard. Fortunately I happened to have with me a certified audit of our affairs from the beginning that showed that Dr. Bob and I had been assigned a royalty but never received any because money had been needed for the AA office work, but we still had a $30-a-week stipend from the Rockefeller dinner. That's what they were getting, $30 a week came to $55 a week after a while. And since the post orders, they began to draw $25 a week from the publishing company which is Works Publishing, which seemed justified from the book sales. My total income was $55 a week. That was the bill. The foundation still had practically no cash balance. The group contributions coming were promptly sent to the office in order to carry out what was going on there. The investigating committee's accountant read the modest financial statement and testified to its correctness. The committee was crestfallen, and they received an apology. Out of this incident came the point, it came in part the philosophy would take form of the 8th tradition. From this incident all involves policy that the code of candor and openness so far as AA's financial matters and their own personal finances were concerned. Tradition 8 solved for once and for all the difficult issue Bill had owned proposition in the fellowship. The income he diverted, that was delivered to him from AA had been taken 10 years to work out. The group conscience plus the experience written in the big book plus Dr. Bob and other AA laborers were the precedents for the 8th tradition. Alcoholics and honesty remained forever non-professional, but our service centers may employ special workers. Bill was not without any doubt in that regard a special worker. and that's how they justified Bill's getting paid and Dr. Bob Bill had his way to say about the no paid missionaries we don't pay to carry a spiritual message it don't work and you don't want to be preached to anyway although that was one of the things he wanted when he got here Bill more than once deserved to be paid for the unique service he rendered to the fellowship the book royalties he received were not payment for 12 step work and that's real important. That was what he did, that was a writing, he got royalties for writing. He wrote a pamphlet that he actually got royalties on, he wrote a couple of pamphlets but one that is known his name is on it uh as so there's a couple things that he did get paid for as royalties as a writer not for doing 12-step work and I think a lot of us get confused with what is 12- step work and what is service work. Uh 12-Step work is just what it is, it's 12-step work. It's one drunk sitting down face to face helping another drunk about how to recover from alcoholism and what to do about it and how we got here and what we did about it. Working, you know, royalties, you don't get paid for that. There's a story of a guy I know who's on the other coast and he helped some guy's son and a guy came up to him at a meeting one day and gave him keys for a brand new Cadillac. And he said, I can't take that Dennis O is the guy's name and he said I can't take that you know I did that because that's what I was taught to do you know when alcohol is helping another it's a nice gesture but we don't do that in Alcoholics Anonymous and he didn't take it so they you know that that's one of the things the dilemma involved with the money problems Bill wrote in a letter from the beginning we have wrestled with the question of paid alcoholic worker seemed an absolute necessity and probably it wasn't until recently. How to make people like myself appear to be voluntary workers yet receive their substance was a problem for him, though I rather expected to make AA my life worker just in that sense. It was always felt that certain inconsistency about such an arrangement. The idea looked good but there's always the feeling that the The best was not yet, and Bill always struggled with that feeling that it may look good but it doesn't mean it is good, and he's real careful about that. He really tried not to mix the two, although other people were giving that impression that he was, and in early 41, Bill's still actively looking for a job. He was thinking in terms of non-professional volunteer workers for the fellowship, including himself as putting on more than full time hours, and that was the problem he was having. do we do this without getting paid and how do I survive as a human being and live? And that's that balance that we're talking about. And that was one of the big issues, and that came about because some people were believing that there was a lot of money being taken out of alcoholics, and I don't know if it happened, you know, that typical alcoholics you know, you ever want to hide something they used to say from an alcoholic, stick it in a big book, they'll never find it. And this was going on right in front of everybody so there's no big secrets. Now the Now the outside of AA. In AAs there have been such emotional things that went on as bold enough to accept employment with outside agencies dealing with the alcohol problem. A university wanted an AA member to educate the public on alcohols, a corporation wanted a professional man familiar with the subject, a state drunk farm wanted a manager who could handle inebriates, The city wanted an experienced social worker who understood what the alcoholic could do to the family. A state alcohol commission wanted a paid researcher. These are not only a few of the jobs which AA members, as individuals, are filling today. They're filling a lot more today, which is involved in the alcoholic field and the treatment field. Now and then, AA members have bought farms and rest homes themselves for barely beat up troopers could find the need and care. The question was, are such activities to be branded as professionalism under AA tradition? The answer to that is no. They're not professionalism. As long as they're doing it as individuals and not using AA's name. And that's where we get into the break in the anonymity thing which will come and starts in the AA tradition really ends in the 12th. It's in every tradition, that anonymity. Over the years of experience, the answer is no, So members who select full-time careers do not professionalize the AA's 12th step. The road to this conclusion was long and rocky, at first we could not see the real issues involved. In the former days, the moment an AA hired out such enterprises, he was immediately tempted to use the name Alcoholics Anonymous for publicity or money raising purposes. Farm's educated ventures and legislation commissions advertised the fact that AA members served them. Unthinking AAs who were also employed recklessly broke their anonymity to thump the tub for their own pet enterprises. For this reason, some very good causes and everything connected with them suffered unjust criticism from the AA groups." groups themselves are the one who spoke the loudest on that. There were cries of professionalism, that guy is making money out of AA yet no single one of us of them had been hired to do AA 12-step. It's a halfway house right around the corner. They do not carry Alcoholics Anonymous' 12 step. What they do is you go in there and the first thing they do tell you to go to a meeting and as a matter of fact they take you in a bus and they drop you off in front of that meeting that's how I got my first AA meeting they helped facilitate that 12 step work they did not do the 12-step work on it I paid a rent I was responsible to sign a sheet that I went to a meeting they were able to check up which a lot of groups today if you go to court there some people will sign those sheets some people won't sign those sheets it's not AA to sign those sheets it is up to the individuals to sign their sheets because we're not bringing AA into the court system. We're not bringing AA into this treatment field or the halfway house field and this is where that 8th tradition is very clear for me today. Now when I came here, I didn't know that. I thought it was all part of AA. It's not. It's a separate entity doing their own thing with their own rules which have nothing to do with Alcoholics Anonymous. So those are you know one of the things that I always like to get on there. Unthinking AA is employed okay. The violation of these instances was not professional at all is breaking of anonymity and that's really what it was when you would I mention the name of whatever halfway house or whatever group I'm doing I am NOT breaking I am not I am it looks like I am I'm not how do I not cooperating with them anymore I am now looks like i am affiliating alcoholics in honor with the name a specific halfway house so with this name of the specific group and when we do these things what we're doing is is we're really breaking the anonymity of ourselves with who we were cooperating with when we got here. I know a lot of people do that, it took me a long time not to mention of the name of the treatment center I came out of or the halfway house I went to or the fractional house I want to after that and I've also learned that now all synonymous I don't use the last names of living people especially in a meeting like this because it is uplinked In other places, I will in a closed meeting. I always like to use my last name in a close meeting because that's what I was taught to do but not if it's going out to the public because it looks like when there is no big shots, there are no little shots, one shot and we're all shot and it's about keeping EO right size. It's always about keeping EO the right size and that becomes a problem in the 8th tradition. So it is significant that almost nowhere in AIA fellowship breaks of anonymity of general public level, so nearly all the fears that have subsided. There are many TV programs on today. There are people who mention their names and what they're doing. Is that a break of the tradition? No, it's a break with anonymity. And we think it's break of tradition. In the old days when you went on TV and they used to have screens so you couldn't see your face. On radio stations today, people mention their name, there's a whole lot of recovery radio station where people are mentioning their full names that is not you know when if they go out and drink the individual who drinks and there's a couple of famous people who have done that they're not the one who gets the black eye alcohol synonymous and what it may do is ruin the opportunity for that new person which is our first tradition to walk into this store and get the help they really need and because those opinions that people have that it's okay and it's not that important that our opinions keep people sick and have the actual ability to kill others. And that's something that we'll talk about in the 10th tradition. We're working our way towards that. Each one of these traditions builds on the one before it, and in traditions, the first five traditions, it's about affirming certain things. In traditions 6 through 12, we're letting go of certain things, we're denouncing certain things... We denounce money, we denounce property and prestige. We denounced professionalism that we don't wanna do these things and yet you can walk in a meeting and hear people talk like they're professionals and that's where you gotta be real careful because there's no professional AA-er. The only kind of AA-ers is a member. That's all any of us will ever be. So this is, these exciting chains of events cast upon AA tradition of nonprofessional Our 12-step message is carrying the message that it's never paid for. When we carry the message, we do it for free. I hear people talk about, why do I have to pay $10 if I'm going to go? The state convention is coming up. Here's a good example. I'm go into a convention. Why is it $30? Well, you're not paying $30 to go to a meeting. You're paying $ 30 so that people that are being flown in who are the speakers for wherever they're getting them, they can meet the obligations to pay for those people's hotel rooms, their flight. They're not getting paid to speak. when they're carrying the message. So, you know, a lot of people think they are. And where does the money go to? It's split up very much, you know, whatever extra money goes to areas it goes into group and they make use of that money and they spread it to the state through the state convention. It'll go back to the next convention. They stay poor like we do in groups. So for those who labor in service for us those people who work in service, the labor is always worthy of their hire. So if you're working in the industry but you don't walk into an AA room as a professional therapist you don' t walk into a room as professional counselor there are none. All there are are AA members. There's a lot of people that are doctors in these rooms but a lot of them aren't physicians and I learned that early on also So, you know, we don't practice that in the rooms. So we've got to be real careful of the messages we hear and how we're hearing them. And, you Know, we've Got to stay nonprofessional in here. We've all Got to Stay, which Brings Us Back to That First Tradition, That We're All Equal. We're Practicing Unity Here. There's No Better AA Member Than The One Sitting Next To You. If You're Sitting In A Room With Alcoholics Anonymous And You Haven't Drank Today, You're Equal To Everybody Else. Again, It's That Eighth Tradition That Was So Hard To Hammer Out and that came over a lot of bad blood in Alcoholics Anonymous. A lot of controversy went on in that 8th tradition. So with that, we're going to kill Tradition 8 and start talking about Tradition 9 next week. Thanks for letting me share. Thank you very much.