The Bottom Line

Last year, I was at a Six Flags amusement park, and after my friends and I waited in line to park and buy our tickets, we entered into another long line right inside of the gates. It wasn’t until 10 minutes later that we realized it was the line for the carousel, which none of us wanted to ride (or admit that we did anyway). We had simply seen the line and blindly gotten in it.

Lining up has become a natural instinct: I am often tempted to gather a dozen people, line up at nothing, and see how many people join. If you join the end of a line with a beginning you can’t see, how do you know you’re really lining up for anything at all? Have we Americans been outwitted by the line?

Sports teams have a starting line-up, concerts have headliners, and most of us would never think to write against the lines on notebook paper. Duke University has an entire subculture based upon waiting in line for basketball tickets. When I went to get my driver’s license, my family’s main concern was not if I had the ability to single-handedly operate a motor vehicle; it was, “Do you think the line will be too long today at the DMV?” The line is taking over America one skinny step at a time. Lining up to go to the washroom or to go to the lunchroom is the first thing I remember learning as a first-grader, and when someone did something especially commendable, the reward was always being named “line-leader”. We are conditioned to crave, love, and live the line.

Lines can also be a very positive recreational force on society. Standing in line at CVS is the perfect time to check out the latest issue of People, and I’m not going to lie and say I haven’t made friends with people in line with me at Annenberg. Lines are also useful for eavesdropping, gossip, and other guiltily indulgent social activities generally frowned upon unless you’re standing one person behind the other.

For all of their virtues, it isn’t surprising that things go horribly awry in the absence of lines. From the tragic stampedes that kill hundreds during the Muslim hajj to the depressingly comical Lamont Dessert Riot of 2005, man-made blunders have shown time after time that chaos ensues once lines fail to make their heralded appearance. If it is part of being civilized to form lines, then it certainly speaks to our innate, visceral tendencies when affairs become pandemonium in their want.

At Harvard as much as anywhere else, lines infiltrate our existence. Some of us snort them, some dance in them, others memorize them, some draw them, many form them, and a few people don’t stand in them based on principle. But is this “domination of the line” actually a sign that we are becoming submissive creatures, bending to the pressure of joining something, standing in something, just because everybody else is? Perhaps. But I think our tendency to line up speaks more to our increased attention to efficiency and organization. For now, I am choosing to remain faithful that we are still thinking for ourselves.

Until I wait another ten minutes for a carousel. There, I swear I am drawing the line.



Emma M. Lind ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, lives in Grays Hall.