2024, false... I think it's BC rather than AD. All the phenomena we witness in this country are still trying with all their might to stop the lives of Syrians and kill them in very long queues, even longer than their lifespans, stagnant queues since 14 years.
If you add up the time you spend standing in lines in this country, starting from standing in line for bread, waiting for official documents, to your current time standing in line for "kaziat" (petrol stations), waiting for transportation... you'll discover that almost a quarter of your life is spent waiting for "relief."
The government always excels in creating new queues that apply to the Syrian citizen's chest to obtain essential subsidized food items like sugar, rice, and tea, in addition to queues for basic fuel materials like diesel, gas, and gasoline. In front of bill payment counters, queues pile up and lengthen, and each bill requires a full day and sometimes a week of a citizen's life to be paid.
Perhaps the idea of queues and people's regularity in them would comfort you, suggesting equality, progress, and development. But your rosy thoughts quickly fade when you discover that the queue has become a unit of measurement for our ages, a measure only describable as queues of oppression and humiliation.
This one lived through twenty queues, and that one aged, as his life extended to eighty queues, and another was snatched while in his eighth queue, so the queue became a measure of Syrians' ages. It's the inverse relationship from the perspective of Syrian mathematics... the bigger the queue, the shorter the life.
If that's truly the case, everyone would prefer to stand at the front of the line, shortening their lives filled with pain, suffering, and the race against time each time.
Actually, and away from theorizing, standing in line doesn't shorten lifespans ("lifespans are in the hands of God"), but it delays them because the wasted time due to queues at "kaziat" and waiting for buses steals precious hours of citizens' lives. All Syrians spend their lives under the bridge of the president, and in front of the Syrian Trade Centers, among many others, instead of spending time to rise intellectually, culturally, and economically.
Even university and school students don't have time for that, although progress and advancement are their responsibility, yet they wait in the alleys for a "service" to take them to their universities or schools. It's the transportation crisis!!
In this case, the queue is also present, but its presence here is slightly different, mixed with bruises, fighting, racing, and sometimes foul language. In the transportation queue, survival is for the fittest, not for the most patient or enduring. The more you push, the more you'll succeed and reach where you want.
On the other hand, these queues create a kind of intimacy among the waiters, as there's a need to fill the time with different conversations. Here, you can hear discussions about politics, society, religion, economics, general culture, and domestic affairs.
Luck might lead you to listen to someone describing medications or eavesdropping on the mobile phone of the person next to you, where they showcase their knowledge in technology, cars, or money laundering, and the relationship between the dollar, gold, and oil, to the point where your eavesdropping extends to the intricacies of the relationship between the phone owner and their lover, and you might even rejoice if things are going well on behalf of the real person involved in the relationship.
It's said that the British are the most proficient people in the world at queuing, to the extent that every Briton can line up alone since birth. It seems that this war has made Syrians surpass the British in these matters, as every Syrian lines up in front of the mirror every morning to count the queues of their daily problems before deciding to join the "queues of sustenance."
