"Turns out, around here -
the 'good old days'
wern't as great as they'd remembered.
The old 'my way or the highway'-
wound up running themselves off."
This isn't about the good old days. It is the present reality. And it isn't about my way or the highway either. It's about "Respect Your Elders." Find yourself a copy of one of Don Coyhis' talks. Don is a Native American man from Colorado Springs. He has been sober a long time and comes from a culture where the elders are respected and valued as a valuable resource. He brings that into Alcoholics Anonymous and talks about it from the podium. Many of the old-timers I've talked to are sick of the meetings where everything goes but AA, where "a drug is a drug is a drug," where sponsorship, the steps, God, The Traditions, and the old-timers themselves are viewed as passe'. When they speak up, they are called stodgy, rigid, nostalgic, old-fashioned, and worse. They are disrespected and sometimes shouted down. They are ignored. So they don't go to meetings. Hell, I'm not even an old-timer and I get the same stuff sometimes. Most of the meetings around here I won't get called on because they know what I'll say. So I know what Steve means when he says he feels like a Baptist in a mosque. It's a sad day when an alcoholic feels out of place in the one place he shouldn't feel out of place in.
"I learned early on that my sponsor is just as close to a drink as I am.."
If I'm just as close to a drink now as I was when I was new, where's the hope in that?