My name’s Frank Lynch. Hello, Frank. Powerless over alcohol, sober today. And, you know, I’m glad I came. I’m glad I was invited. Matter of fact, I’m always glad I’m invited, and I’m always grateful. And I hope I, I always remain more grateful and gratified in AA because I was the kind of a drunk that finished up not wanted anywhere by anyone at any time. That is a pathetic plight for a human being, considering that somewhere in the universe, people like you and I are created to be a little higher than the pet animals we keep. And then tragically, through a series of events, events which are not of our choosing, events that history will call by many names, we take a drink, and we lose something. We take another one, we lose a little more. And the things we lose perhaps at first are only opportunities. And we start to lose hopes. Then we start to lose the physical things of life, and that doesn’t bother us drunks because we are the survivors of the world.

We will survive without them, and we will survive despite this world. And so we feel, and we think, and we believe. We take another drink, and we muster all the intelligences we have, and we lose a little more. And then we muster whatever is within us, and we still lose a little more, but still we survive. And then we start to lose the things that no man on the face of this earth can lose and survive as a sane and a rational human being. We start to lose the values that makes us the highest of God’s creations, the thinking animal, the one He will put on Earth that will bring all other things subject to him. The strongest of the beast he will subdue. The wildest he will cage. The canniest he will outthink. And he will have control of everything that moves and breathes or swims or flies. And then pathetically one day, he will look at himself, and he will find that he does not have even control of his own humanity, his own self, and his own being.

And then slowly and surely, he will start to be stripped of the only armor man has against all that will be, all the arrows and slings that will ever come against him. And slowly and surely, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, he will be stripped of the armor of his integrity, of his decency, and then finally of his dignity, the only quality and the only value and the only wealth that man has ever had. And a power will take that away, a power he doesn’t understand, a mysterious thing, a phantom that strikes and hits and goes and takes with him. And he’ll spend the hours of his days and his nights trying to devise the defenses against the phantom, the one he doesn’t even understand. And he’ll know the terror. He’ll know the loneliness. He’ll know the frustration. He’ll know what it is to slowly be stripped until he stands so naked before the world that it seems unjust that any God should permit him to live and let his fellow man see him.