One Tradition to Defend Another

A columnist in the local paper writes that A.A. has a five per cent success rate. It isn't vicious. He read it somewhere, he's wrong, and people in that town will read it and not come. A member who writes well offers to answer it. The group agrees, because the alternative is letting it stand while the people who need a meeting are the ones reading it. The letter is measured, it's accurate, and it's signed with the group's name. It runs on Thursday. And from that moment it is the second half of a public exchange. The columnist now has a reason to write back, and a reason to be sharper about it, having been corrected in front of his own readers. Whatever he says next, the story in that town is no longer about alcoholism. It's an argument, and A.A. is one of the two sides in it. A.A.'s service literature names exactly that trap (A.A. Service Manual): an act like this puts a body "in the position of having violated one A.A. Tradition in order to defend another." The group protected A.A.'s name by spending it.