FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Lines Drawn So Carefully in the Past Have Largely Been Erased.
"This is the line!" Billy pressed hard with the yardstick as he drew a line, visible only to him and John, down the middle of their bedroom that would separate his side of the room from his older brother's.
"You cannot put your things on my side or come on my side of the line unless I say it's okay. This is my private property, so stay on your own side!" Billy said emphatically as he pointed the tip of the yardstick to John’s side of the room.
"That's just fine with me! And see to it that you stay on your side and don't you mess around with my things on my side when I'm not home, Twerp, or I'll punch you out!" came a forceful reply from John.
Even though the line through the middle of the room was imaginary, its power to establish boundaries that would be enforced, respected, even fought over by the parties involved was very real. The existence or power of such a line might be scoffed at as nonsensical child's-play, yet just such lines have always had a very important role in the lives of adults the world over.
Lines (Real, Imagined or Metaphoric) Draw Boundaries.
Consider the lines of longitude and latitude that crisscross any globe or map of the earth and are designated by incremental numbers called degrees. If you were to search the surface of the earth from an aircraft to observe these lines it would be in vain, yet these unseen lines are used to guide airplanes and ships to their destinations, to establish property lines, political boundaries, to locate sections of oceans or of land, to establish date lines, time lines, climate zones, to plot ocean and wind currents, and so on. Reference to lines can be used metaphorically, such as "the bottom line," "What's My Line?" as the TV show was called, "questioning along those lines." "That wolf hands everyone that same old line." Some lines are more concrete, literally, such as the Wall of China and the Berlin Wall. In any case, what happens on one side of a line or boundary is very different from what happens on the other side. Lines, real, metaphoric, or imagined, draw parameters that dictate what we do and how we do it. There is great security in lines, in the drawing of lines, for we learn what to expect and how to respond to whatever the line encompasses. If they are absent, no one knows quite what to do.
These lines represent the rules and laws pertaining to the rightness or wrongness of what we do or don't do. They are codes of behavior that include the preservation of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, sanctity of the family, honesty in its many forms, sexual morality, rules of etiquette and ethics, protection of the environment, traffic laws, laws in the workplace, political, military, and business. It is universally recognized that these codes are necessary for civilizations to survive successfully. Civilizations rise or fall depending on how individual citizens respect and practice these codes of conduct.