Do We Really Care?

THE MEETING I attend most regularly (that makes it my home group, I suppose) is the one closest to where I live in the suburbs of a sprawling California metropolis. Frequently, one of our old-timers brings to our meeting a vanload of six or seven men from a downtown treatment facility where she works. Many of these men were, at one time in their lives, residents of neighborhoods like the one where our group meets; but in the course of drinking their way through life, most of them have bombed out to the status of refugees in the inner city, where skid row has only the cold company of a lot of classy new bank and savings-and-loan buildings.