Issue 13.16
The principles of recovery published by Alcoholics Anonymous and other groups that work with people to assist them with addictions or Self-Defeating-Behaviours are below. I believe we can use this same prescription to heal our nation and set a better course for the future.
What is the nature of our addictions and SDBs as a nation? Here is a partial list. We are addicted to spending our children’s money. We are addicted to relying on government to solve our problems and take care of us when we are irresponsible. We are addicted to entertainment, substituting it for productivity. We are addicted to harming or coercing others when they don’t do what we want them to. We create enemies by harming or killing innocents and call it “collateral damage”. We borrow incessantly, mostly from our own family (citizens) and allow the debt to become unpayable, threatening their future and well-being. We are choosing paper and money shuffling for profit over creating value by creating products – choosing to send the creativity and production to other nations. We engage in and are happy with the politics of destruction and character assassination, assuring that good people are very hesitant to enter the arena and causing them to fail. Our elections are the new “bread and circuses” that brought down the Roman Empire.
- Admit that we are powerless over our addiction – that our lives have become unmanageable.
- Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
- Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him.
- Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
- Admit to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
- We are entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
- Humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings.
- Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- Continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.
- Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
- Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to other addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
As you look through these concepts, two things will be evident. First, as a nation and as individuals, we need to acknowledge and submit to a higher power than man and his institutions. The second is that we must realize that our greed, carelessness and false pride are the basis of our addictions and our unwillingness to do the first thing. I know it is unpopular to speak of spiritual things when considering the situation and future of our nation, but those things are the ones that actually can create what we really want. It is possible to be strong and spiritual. In fact it may be the only path to the future we really want. Consider this scripture.
2 Chronicles 7:14 – “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
The next couple of articles in this series will look at specific ways we can incorporate the concepts of AA to bless our land and our people.”
Lynn West is a thinker, a teacher and a patriot. You can reach him through email at forgingthefuture2021@gmail.com or through this newspaper. Liberty is a state of being which must be continually created. These articles can help all of us discover the ways we can contribute to that outcome.