Nobody Can Charge You

Nobody in A.A. can charge you. Not for the meeting, not for the coffee, not for the man who drives across town at two in the morning to sit on your bathroom floor. That is not good manners or generosity — it is written down, and Tradition 8 is where. It had to be written because money kept turning up anyway, and A.A. needed to say exactly what it was refusing. The Tradition itself settles it in ten words. It says: "We define professionalism as the occupation of counseling alcoholics for fees or hire." Charging a drunk for counsel. That is the whole of what the word means here — and it does not mean paid work in general. A.A. hires people to answer its phones, keep its books and mail literature into prisons, and pays them properly for it. Members mix those two things up constantly, and Bill W. did not pretend otherwise. He said: "On this subject we have all done a pile of fuzzy thinking. And I would be one of the first to plead guilty to that charge." He also said the cause was not greed: "The reason for our fuzzy thinking is the usual one — it is fear." Fear of losing the one thing that finally worked, which is fair enough — but fear without the definition just makes suspects of the people doing the unglamorous jobs.