The speaker who qualified at Sunday's meeting said one of the most important things the newcomer could do is to find similarities between him and the others at the meeting. He said when he first got sober he paid attention to how he was different from others in the rooms. He said it’s important to realize we’re at meetings because we have a problem with alcohol or drugs. Everyone, he said, has differences in their backgrounds, education, or ethnicity. But none of those things is as relevant as the fact of the disease brought us to the room.

I was like the speaker. When I first started trying to get sober some 25 years ago I recall going to a meeting where many of those attending were unemployed. At the time it was nearly impossible for me to quit drinking. I was drinking every day. I drank when I got out of bed. I drank when I awoke in the middle of the night. No matter how much effort I made, I couldn't stop. Yet I had the ego or the false pride to look at myself as different from the others in the meeting. And the only reason I did that was because I had a job and they didn’t.

This kind of discrimination, separating myself from others for whatever reason,will keep me sick. My brother, who died of this disease, would say "I'm not like these other guys. I had a job. I had a car." The reality is that my brother was as bad or worse as anyone I've met in Alcoholics Anonymous. And immediately before he got sober, he was homeless and had nowhere to go. He was so entrenched in his disease that six months after he left the halfway house he died of complications of alcoholism. Would he have died anyway? I don't know. But I do know he would have had a better chance to survive whatever was going on with him had he been sober. He looked at the differences between himself and the others at the meeting.

One of the insidious aspects of our disease is it is lying in wait to kill us. And part of the process of it wanting to kill us is it tells us "you're not so bad. You're not like those other guys. You can handle your booze." We must override and fight this with every ounce of our ability. We must look to the banker, to the labor, to the illiterate, to the illegal alien who doesn't speak our language, as members of the group who are there for the same reasons. They are our saviors because they might tell a story or share an experience that will make us realize the severity of our disease.

I thank them for being there. One of the "different" members of that group might have saved my life today.