Somebody Has to Be Told

Something happens on a Tuesday. A man comes in loaded and talks over the speaker for twenty minutes, and a woman three weeks sober walks out and doesn't come back. At the business meeting the group does the reasonable thing: it makes a rule. Nobody obviously intoxicated stays in the room. It's a good rule. It was written to protect exactly the person who left. Then it has to be enforced. Somebody has to make the call at the door, and now the group has a member whose job is deciding who's too drunk — and everyone has an opinion, and the opinions are about people, and people take sides. Bill watched this play out across the whole Fellowship and reported the result (A.A. pamphlet P-17): "Most attempts at enforcement generate such waves of dissension and intolerance in the group that this condition is presently recognized to be worse for the group life than the very worst that the worst ever did." Worse than the drunk man. That's the finding. Not that the rule was wrong-hearted — that enforcing it cost more than the thing it forbade.