May 20

May 20 – AM

Page 103, Working With Others, Chapter 7

We are careful never to show intolerance or hatred of drinking as an institution.  Experience shows that such an attitude is not helpful to anyone.  Every new alcoholic looks for this spirit among us and is immensely relieved when he finds we are not witch burners.  A spirit of intolerance might repel alcoholics whose lives could have been saved, had it not been for such stupidity.  We would not even do the cause of temperate drinking any good, for not one drinker in a thousand likes to be told anything about alcohol by one who hates it.
Some day we hope that Alcoholics Anonymous will help the public to a better realization of the gravity of the alcoholic problem, but we shall be of little use if our attitude is one of bitterness or hostility.  Drinkers will not stand for it.
After all, our problems were of our own making.  Bottles were only a symbol.  Besides, we have stopped fighting anybody or anything.  We have to!

May 20 – PM

Page 84-85, Into Action, Chapter 6

And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone—even alcohol.  For by this time sanity will have returned.  We will seldom be interested in liquor.  If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame.  We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically.  We will see that our new attitude toward liquor has been given us without any thought or effort on our part.  It just comes!  That is the miracle of it.  We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation.  We feel as though we had been placed in a position of neutrality—safe and protected.  We have not even sworn off. Instead, the problem has been removed.  It does not exist for us.  We are neither cocky nor are we afraid.  That is our experience.  That is how we react so long as we keep in fit spiritual condition.