MSCA - Mid Southern California Area 09 of Alcoholics Anonymous

Delegate's Bulletin Board

The Virtual Delegate 7 April 2020

Personal Mission Statement: “I’m committed to being totally available and responsible to Mid-Southern California Area 09 members, to help provide a healthy infrastructure to communicate among individuals, Groups, Districts, Area, and the General Service Office, while using as few acronyms as possible!”

Gerry W, Chair of Harbor Area Archives has asked AA members to share on the topic, “A.A in the Time of Coronavirus.” These stories may be submitted to him at archiveschair@hacoaa.org. My submission follows.

Within the confines of anonymity, my rise to infamy as Mid-Southern California Area 09, Panel 70 delegate has been spectacular, and virtual. Having never been elected as Panel 68 alternate delegate (I filled in for ours who resigned) or Panel 70 delegate (I was drawn out of the hat), I feel I’ve been sucked into existing voids of General Service, though willing rather than kicking and screaming. I’ve served where I’m needed without excessive ambition to go there. Thereby, fulfilling what past trustee, Joel C has recommended: “When it comes to General Service, do it, but don’t want it.”

Even so, there were thrilling hours of feeling I’d arrived at the very, near-bottom of AA. With nearly 13 years of General Service under my belt and in my heart, I was intimately familiar with AA functions at Group, District, and Area levels, and I’ve come to personally love many AA’s with whom I’ve served. There were times in the middle of the night when I pinched myself and said, “How cool, you’re the Delegate!” (at first, with a capital D; it was only later it changed to a little d).

However, another part of me told the rest of me that I was also one of the worst-read AA’s in the history of General Service. I must be the only delegate who cannot quote any of the Concepts, and am also most comfortable having a written list of the Traditions in front of me when more knowledgeable AA’s bounce among our Traditions like a pinball on a Saturday night. I remember Jeryl T, past delegate of Area 09, laughing at me and shaking his head when I openly shared that I only discovered in October 2019 that all of AA’s pamphlets and much of our other literature is available on aa.org under the AA Literature link.

So, in late October 2019, I began studying the Service Manual with a vengeance. By Christmas 2019, I’d read or studied for the first time 19 AA pamphlets. When I discovered I’d been added to the General Service Conference Literature Committee on December 18, 2019, I began studying even more AA literature, and by the time I’d spent 50 hours reading the Conference Agenda Items Background Information on April 3, 2020, I’d studied 22 more AA pamphlets and guidelines, with more than 40 pieces of literature by then on my reading resume. At Christmas 2019, I bought Pass It On, AA Comes of Age, Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers, and Our Great Responsibility in a package deal, having never read any of them (something that’s bound to make an Archivist cringe!), and by March 2020 had read them all.

By the time I hit PRAASA in Tucson on the weekend of March 7, coinciding with my 60th belly-button birthday, my then much-improved, literature-informed delegate’s mentality was barreling at full speed, as I rapidly, along with everyone else, rolled into the future, naively oblivious to how all of our lives were about to change. As I write this a month later on April 7, 2020, I know now that PRAASA marked the exact date when I went from being a physical delegate to becoming a virtual delegate. Between reading the PRAASA 2019 minutes at the 2020 business meeting, to presenting a seven-minute panel topic on changing the Big Book, to sharing a two-minute reading of Area 09 highlights, to sitting on the panel for an hour with the other 14 delegates in the “stump the delegate” ask-it-basket session, I’d experienced almost two hours as a physical delegate in the Tucson spotlight.

And now, a month later, I sit here beside an open window (as it’s snowing outside here in Wrightwood), in the large warm glow of my computer screen and the small cold glow of my cell phone, having had only four face-to-face AA meetings with other drunks since mid-March, and none of them at the General Service level. In other words, when I drove home from Tucson on March 8, I entered the world of the virtual delegate: Email-invites to numerous Zoom meetings, resulting in numerous hours in those Zoom meetings.

Like many of you, I’ve spent dozens of hours in virtual AA Zoom meetings, with as few as three alcoholics to as many as 175. Some alcoholics in these larger rooms are soundly asleep, snoring in front of their phones and computers, a few of them with only a few hours of sobriety (i.e., they had their hopefully-last drink before joining the meeting). But it’s the General Service Zoom meetings that have given me the fulfillment I experience at Area Assemblies, Area Service Committee meetings, and District meetings (having attended 15-or-so District elections last fall).

In the last two weeks, I’ve attended three business meetings with Districts 1, 4, and 12, and have another one this evening with District 6. I doubt that, except for the coronavirus and government orders to stay at home, that I would have had the latitude (or the invites) to attend so many District meetings. With between 35 and 60 members in attendance, I’ve witnessed the bright-eyes that our General Servants at the District and Group levels have been given. I’ve also attended Zoom meetings with the other 14 Pacific Region delegates and was invited just an hour ago to meet virtually with the other nine delegates comprising the Panel 70 Literature Committee for the Conference.

And, those events have served as appetizers for what has, so far, been my most fulfilling General Service event since PRAASA: The April 5 Pre-Conference Workshop, where we met in a Zoom session between 08:30 am and 2:00 pm with 145 of our Trusted Servants to talk about the tools created by our MSCA 09 Chair (Mitchell B) and distributed by our MSCA 09 Secretary (Ryan W). In considering the 56-or-so Agenda Items, I as your delegate, am seeking a group conscience from all who want to participate, so that I can eventually have our Area’s written group conscience in front of me for the virtual General Service Conference currently scheduled for May 2020.

Like all of you, I was rocketed into the 4th Dimension of Cancellation and Postponement, leaving me so thankful that we were together for PRAASA! With the cancellation of the face-to-face Boot Camp, Pre-Conference Workshop, Pacific Regional Forum, and International Convention, I slowly adapted to the growing list of lost opportunities to meet with fellow General Servants. Then the face-to-face April 19-25 Conference was cancelled, replaced by the hopeful promise of a virtual Conference between May 16 and 22, 2020, which, so far, seems like the biggest loss.

Past Panel 68 delegate, Jesus O, shared that each delegate is either in their first year or their last year of service in that position. Except for our January committee chair elections and our Area Service Committee meeting in February, all of my time as delegate with our General Servants has been virtual, and in a month-or-so a quarter of my time as a delegate will have elapsed, with no promise that even the 71st face-to-face General Service Conference scheduled for 2021 will occur.

In one of our District meetings, Anthony A asked me what has been the most personal question, so far: “How have these lost opportunities affected my experience as delegate?” I was surprised and pleased to hear myself think that, whereas a small part of me understands that these events and opportunities are forever lost, not to be repeated or available in the future, the bigger part of me realizes that there has been a lot of work done already and there is a lot of work still to do, as we continue to try and represent the 62,000 alcoholics reportedly attending 2,000 AA meetings in mid-Southern California. I’m happy to report that I’m not dwelling in the past, which is populated by the wreckage of lost opportunities, so much as I’m looking to the now and the future to be sure that I (and by every indication, all your other MSCA 09 officers, as well) remain engaged and available.

This prevailing mentality has led me to slightly revise what we all know as our “Responsibility Pledge,” to what I am now calling our “Availability Pledge:”

“I am Available. When anyone, anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of MSCA 09 to always be there, and for that, I am Available.”

God Bless, and Stay healthy!

In Love and service, Ed.
msca09delegate70@yahoo.com,
(760) 964-0012