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From: Bo S
Category: Category 1
Date: 08 Aug 2002
Time: 02:38:05
Remote Name: 216.0.47.235
Yeah, it is pretty strong.
Still, it is real hateful to me the way we get so careful to phrase things politely that the reader slips into a recovery fog. People who love me often have to shake me to get my attention. I think the 'idiot' term was meant more to nudge people who fall into simple, well known traps that this is not admirable behavoir and they should be better communicators where 'dependence' games show up.
I am not arguing for the material, it is pretty raw but I am glad you took the time and trouble to write. We are in great danger of being lulled into extinction. When clean addicts have to mince words and worry about offending readers of our type, I feel they are losing touch with the actuality of our delima. We are all 100% capable of dying a shitty and ugly death over a love friend, a resentment, a simple misunderstanding. It doesn't seem to take much.
Has anyone talked to you about the left lobe/right lobe stuff? You know the left lobe has words, sense of time, has named itself the 'dominant' lobe, etc. The right lobe of the brain is specialized for wholistic perception, intuition, streetwiseness, etc. Well, when we sat down to work on the Basic Text, Gina H from Nashville made me read a wonderful book called 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.' It really helped me understand sentences like,"Bruce lee used to still the incessant rambling of the left lobe." So, in these discussions of correct terminology, I don't think of some of our word choices as slang of vernacular. I think of them as attention getters and waker uppers. When we are lucky enough to collect - or oringinate! - unvarnished truth about an addicts real experience with recovery, I feel we have a right, perhaps a duty, to publish that truth, without worrying that some hospital administrator will knee jerk into self-righteous and issue orders to burn all NA literature on the property. Anne Rice wrote that true evil comes when the mind is divorced from the human heart, and begins to pursue its own goals trampling all who oppose as if they were no more than insects to be cleared away. I have to slow my reactions and test for my humaness every single day of my new life clean. I am just one little guy but profanity no longer frightens me som much as people in charge who want to tell me how to talk, and limits my words to exclude terminology that may be too radical for them.
I am risking this share in hopes I am responding to the sincerity of your post. If we are afraid to express ourselves in sharp, reactive terms, many of our readers just ain't gonna get it! You've been to your share of funerals, right? Politeness never got me clean. I like to fuss. I need to ramble. My world if full of imperfect specimens like myself. I will never be perfect. I think perfection is a disease!
Instead of justifying this one terms, this one time, my hope is to address the whole idea that words can save lives. What gets lost when we lock up the literature process and make a business of recovery, is the members no longer feels loved or cared about. The term will likely be the first to go when we do a literature conference on this book. But if I take it out now, what's that gonna do? Resolve all the problems before the Fellowship really gets a chance to do a open to all memebers, participatory literature conference? If I really could do that, what would be the result? Bo and inputters wrote a great book? Wouldn't it be ok to say, Bo and many NA members drafted a work so good that a thousand addicts showed up to work on it producing a lasting and fitting tribute to real NA recovery twenty years after the Basic Text came out.
In Loving Service,
Bo S. Seeking to be a servant worthy of trust...