Maybe it's time for our leaders to look at the AA 12-Step Program!

I just returned from an Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting, which I have been attending for some three months now.  Whenever we speak we identify ourselves as "I'm So and So, and I'm an adult child of an alcoholic and a dysfunctional family."

Tonight I finally got up the nerve to admit that I came from a dysfunctional family.  A couple hours later I finally admitted that I also come from a dysfunctional nation, the good Old US of A.

We are a nation of millions of families who are addicted to oil and other types of fossil fuel.  We are addicted to cheap junk from China and their sweat shops. We have enabled our leaders in their dysfunctional roles of setting the agenda that has gotten us all in one big mess here at home and in the world.

I am picking up on many ideas of Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations and history at Boston University, and most recently the author of The Long War, among other books critical of our current American culture from the head guy on down to our local next door neighbor.

He says that Americans since its apex in the 50s and early 60s have looked upon its military as the answer to all its world problems. We in the USA, like children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families, will do anything to not be abandoned.  Thus we put our hopes in our leaders and our military to keep us together, to not be abandoned.  We will even sacrifice our children to the God of War in order to sustain our dysfunctional relationships.  Maybe our relationships bring us misery and are abusive, but they are relationships and we cannot be out of these relationships.

Alcoholics and children of alcoholics usually don't find their way to recovery and to lives as mature adults as long as we rely on their own perceived power to do it.  It is only when we admit that we are powerless that we finally begin to go into recovery. This is the first step that any member of AA knows has to happen before we can go on to the other 11 steps.

Gamblers, workaholics, addicts of all stripes and persuasions, those with mental health problems.....they can all be the root cause of children growing up in dysfunctional families.  And these families can perpetuate themselves into generation after generation as the children grow up to become parents of their own families which become dysfunctional families in themselves.

It is only when some of the children, perhaps only one at a time, wake up and admit the dysfunction within the family they grew up in or even the family they are now raising, that the movement into recovery and functionality can begin.

Reaching such a point is not fun.  As a matter of fact, most of us fight such an admission for decades, and we can take decades after the admission to finally see the fruits of recovery.

With that as some background information, I take some language from The Problem we children of alcoholics repeat weekly, and apply it to us as citizens:

      "We citizens have come to feel isolated, uneasy with other people - especially authority figures.  So we became people pleasers, even though we lose our own identities in the process.  We citizens often mistake any personal criticism as a threat.

"We citizens took on another compulsive personality, such as a workaholic.  We live life from the standpoint of victims...We became reactors, rather than actors, letting others take the initiative.

"We citizens became dependent personalities - terrified of abandonment - willing to do almost anything to hold onto a relationship in order not to be abandoned.  Yet our country keep choosing insecure relationships. 

"As citizens we learn to keep our feelings down and bury them deeper year after year.  We confuse love with pity, tending to love those we can rescue.  Even more self-defeating, we become addicted to excitement in all our affairs, preferring constant upset to workable relationships."

So maybe it is now time for our country to start on its own 12 step program so as a nation we can begin to recover from successive generations of addiction and dependency. So let's get started:

1. We citizens admit that we are powerless over our past, that our democracy has   become unmanageable and a joke.
2. We believe that a power greater than ourselves can restore the USA to sanity.
3. We make a decision to turn our country over to a Higher Power.
4. Our people make a searching and fearless moral inventory of our country.
5. We admit to our Higher Power, to ourselves and to our government, the exact nature of our country's wrongs to its own people and people outside our borders.
6. We are entirely ready to have our Higher Power remove all these defects of our dealings within and outside of our borders.
7. Our country asks our Higher Power to remove its and our shortcomings.
8. We make a list of all classes and countries our country has harmed, and insist that it makes amends to all.
9. Our country makes direct amends to such people whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. We as a country continue to take societal inventory and when our country is wrong, we promptly admit it.
11. We seek through meditation to improve our conscious contact with our Higher  Power, asking for the power to carry out what is revealed to us.
12. We try to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

We Americans by and large have let our leaders mishandle our energy and health care policies, our housing markets, our economy, our educational systems....all because we have enabled them to become our dysfunctional parents. We have relinquished to them our government that is of, by and for the people.

Maybe once we as a country, as well as those we have chosen to lead us, admit that we really have messed up our corporate lives, we can at last approach recovery in front of our global neighbors. 

Who knows?  Maybe a few other countries could also go through the 12 step program leading from dysfunction into functioning.

Rachael Bliss, after working for 10 years in creative services and community affairs at a local broadcasting station, moved into the nonprofit world with her first job with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, AL. From there she advocated for the hungry, children and the environment as an organizer and director. Articles by Rachael Bliss at MWC News http://mwcnews.net/RachaelBliss

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