As we contemplate the lack of leadership in our continued weak and tardy response to the on-going turmoil and atrocities in the Middle East, it takes me back 75 years when Democrat president, Franklyn D. Roosevelt, confronted the German Third Reich and the imperial Japanese army with Old Testament fervor. The Germans and Japanese had committed acts, which equaled and even surpassed the horrors of ISIS and other … [Read more...]

When I first began going to AA meetings at the Cosmopolitan Club (Cosmo) and Baptist Hospital in Little Rock in 1980, my first reaction (I was few months sober) was “woe is me.” But as I settled in, I realized I was in the company of a by-and-large interesting group of men and women, who’s focus was on getting well. A few years later, the Wolfe Street Center opened and Gene Walters led a fabulous Sunday morning meeting and Joe McQuany started packing them in with his Monday night lecture on the … [Read more...]

Picture if you will, eight women parked in front of the Clinton Street Brooklyn home of Bill and Lois Wilson. Their motors are running and they are steamed. On this night in 1938, their husbands, most of them newly sober, are attending a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous with the organization’s co-founder, Bill Wilson. What ticks the ladies off is that their husbands have replaced drinking with meetings, leaving them once again alone and unloved. At that moment, Lois, with suddenly … [Read more...]

“At the end of my drinking,” Don Gold begins, “the bottom I hit was both terrifying and dramatic. The accumulated wreckage of twenty-seven years of alcoholic drinking and all the “isms” that come with it looked insurmountable and hopeless. I had been hospitalized, detoxed, and placed in a treatment program that had brought me to our program. While AA made no demands on me, the treatment facility did, telling me I had to get a sponsor. “Being an alcoholic,” Don Continues, “the first thing I … [Read more...]

“When we don’t do the daily things we need to do to live and be free, when we don’t face things and deal with them, when we don’t admit our faults, when we sweep things under the rug, we give up our freedom. We are then in bondage, and this is manifested by, expressed by, all kinds of problems: alcoholism, drug dependency, codependency, and so on.”  Joseph Daniel Mcquany I was newly sober in the spring of 1980, when I met two men who changed my life forever, the late Joe Mcquany, a man who … [Read more...]