A Dozen Steps

No Coddling

by Mark on September 9th, 2007

The Jack Alexander article was written for the Saturday Evening Post in March, 1941, six years after AA was founded.

Once again some men were seated around a hospital bed speaking with an alcohol patient, this time in Philadelphia. Even in those days they were apparently aware that “baby-sitting, PC” recovery wasn’t going to work.

“The air of the ward was thick with the aroma of paraldehyde, an unpleasant cocktail smelling like a mixture of alcohol and ether which hospitals sometimes use to taper off the paralyzed drinker and soothe his squirming nerves. The visitors seemed oblivious of this and of the depressing atmosphere of psychopathic wards. They smoked and talked with the patient for twenty minutes or so, then left their personal cards and departed. If the man in the bed felt that he would like to see one of them again, they told him, he had only to put in a telephone call.

THEY MADE it plain that if he actually wanted to stop drinking, they would leave their work or get up in the middle of the night to hurry to where he was. If he did not choose to call, that would be the end of it. The members of Alcoholics Anonymous do not pursue or coddle a malingering prospect, and they know the strange tricks of the alcoholic as a reformed swindler knows the art of bamboozling.”

I too was a newcomer who told you that “you didn’t understand.” I tried to bamboozle you with my “swift” intelligence and it didn’t work, thankfully. Folks, it isn’t working today any better than it did then. Our faces have changed a bit but you’re still wasting your air. We do understand!

Share This

Related Stories

No related posts

POSTED IN: Did You Know