Independence Week
by T.M.
Longtime SOS friend and SOS conference participant, T.M., proposed "Independence Week," an international addiction awareness campaign, and received an overwhelmingly positive reaction from SOS conference attendees including all professional presenters, who pledged to endorse and help promote this unique project. An article by T.M. follows. An overview of the "Independence Week" concept will appear soon on the SOS Web sites worldwide and in future issues of the SOS International Newsletter and, YOU can help!
Around ten years ago, I came upon a discovery with more than a touch of absurdity. Like the discovery of the source of the Nile River, it in truth, was not a discovery at all but that which already existed, performing wondrously, replenishing and nurturing all life that its waters touched. This amazing phenomena is called S.O.S., Secular Organizations for Sobriety or Save Our Selves.
Like the waters of the Nile River, S.O.S. nurtures and replenishes the lives it touches; it existed and worked long before my so-called discovery. This lack of personal discovery did not diminish in any way the wonder, the amazement and excitement I experienced, exploring the body of work that described the manifestation of S.O.S. I was gripped by its clarity. It made sense resoundly. It works most effectively and its quiet unrealized potential captures me with fascination.
S.O.S.'s lucidity, its graceful lack of dogma, its methodical simplicity which innately embraces diversity and fosters individuality combines into a natural elixir for an expanding global toxicity.
Having my primary focus in the African Community with the enormous devastation that drugs and alcohol abuse wreaks upon this community, as well as the whole global population, it was self-evident more needs to be done, something much more. The problems germinating from drug and alcohol abuse are indeed myriad, multifaceted and quite profound. It (drug and alcohol abuse) in its various forms, constitute the greatest human dis-ease pandemic of unrivaled epidemic proportions, dwarfing the casualties of the great human plagues, wars, and diseases combined.
Thanks to the invention of S.O.S. by a most kind, humane and unassuming, gentle man by the name of Jim Christopher, "We the People" have an extraordinary antitoxin. A practical method that does not force alien constructions upon the naturally occurring, socio-economic, geopolitical, ethnic, cultural and ideologically diverse human population. Such narrow constructions that do exist, necessarily cannot transcend their own innate limitations. At best, they can only appeal to those that can adapt to the constraints which dogmatic solutions engender. Like the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny," whose appeal is widespread but its viability as a globally embracing doctrine has been, and will continue to be met with antagonism, hostility and rejection irrespective of the numeric increases by segments of the population. As its adherents remain entombed within dogmatic prisms the world moves on, creating thousands upon thousands of flowers, all in bloom.
What was so wonderful about attending the S.O.S. International Conference and about S.O.S. is that instead of superimposing a rigid set of behavioral and moral ideological "isms," S.O.S. affirms the individual and in turn the individual's own unique internal socio-biology masticates, digests and then weaves for herself and himself a tapestry that supports their own sobriety. Thus positively affirming each person to fashion an S.O.S. only form of sobriety support structure and/or allowing anyone to add anything from the world around in the creation of their own unique sobriety support structure.
Hence, it's time to bring straws to the fountain of the Nile. Independence Week is merely a viaduct that brings a spool of silk to the population of the planet to fashion an effective tapestry, according to their will, to support and maintain the ability to remove drugs and alcohol abuse from one's life!