Rhetorical Question : Which is best? A Live, In Person Meeting or a Zoom Meeting?
My personal jury remains out, and I think will forever fail to give me a clear answer to this Rhetorical Question : Which is best, a Live, In Person Meeting or a Zoom Meeting?
Having just written the above, the answer just came to me!
Answer : There is no best answer! Both have advantages and both have disadvantages.
Until the Covid-19 pandemic, the worldwide health crisis of the past year and a half, (that I personally date to March of 2020 when it became a stark reality to me in Lompoc, California, when a local club chained its doors shut) there (basically) were no Zoom AA Meetings.
ZOOM MEETINGS
There are a myriad of reasons to support a Zoom Meeting.
I will not even begin to list all of the reasons to support a Zoom Meeting except to say, IF you need an AA Meeting, a Zoom Meeting is absolutely (with no qualification, restriction, or limitation; totally) better than no meeting at all!
IF you need a meeting, and you are physically unable to attend, or even find, a local, Live In Person Meeting, then a Zoom Meeting is your answer!
IF you are too ill, or otherwise unable to leave your residence, a Zoom Meeting is an excellent solution. If you think, for one New York Minute, that there are Live, In Person Meetings everywhere, then you have not done enough world travel or even extensive travel here in the United States.
Zoom Meetings however are available 24-hours a day, seven days a week, all over the inhabited world.
LIVE, IN PERSON MEETINGS
What could possibly be a reason NOT to attend a Live, In Person Meeting?
The Covid-19 Panedemic.
Odd as it is for me to to write this, in my opinion the Covid-19 Pandemic itself has become perhaps the only reason to think about not attending a Live, In Person Meeting. It has been my personal experience, this past year and a half, that many (if not most) of those attending Live, In Person Meetings are NOT wearing masks and the meetings themselves are NOT stressing social distancing.
No, No, No! I am NOT saying that there are NO, Live, In Person Meetings, following Covid-19 Pandemic protocol suggestions! Possibly 10% of the Live, In Person Meetings ARE serious about being (to the best of their ability) safe in terms of Covid-19 transmission.
Also, the emergence of the Covid-19 vaccines has been a very positive development since this past January of 2021.
HYBRID MEETINGS
A Hybrid Meeting combines a Zoom Meeting with a Live, In Person Meeting.
At a Hybrid Meeting you have both a Live, In Person Meeting as well as a Zoom Meeting where, to some extent, the people on zoom can see the people in the live meeting and visa versa, the live attendees can, to some degree, see those on the Zoom Meeting.
Today I attended, for the fourth time, a local Hybrid Meeting and it was excellent. The members of this Hybrid Meeting spent a fair sum of money, coupled with some highly technically skilled members, to set it up.
As you can see below, it is nice to be able to see the out of doors.
