Perhaps you've heard of the Minneapolis DID, and asked DID what? Are they doing it still, or is it done for good? It's the Downtown Improvement District, which is dedicated to "making Downtown a Clean, Safe, Green & vibrant place." Not literally vibrant; if you sit on a bench, you will not have a trembling sensation in your buttocks. If you do, it's your phone.
They're nice folk in yellow smocks who walk around and clean things. The other day they tweeted out this gruesome stat: "Did You Know? The Minneapolis DID Ambassadors removed 16,740 gum spots last year in #DowntownMpls."
Assuming they work M-F, and assuming there are no repeat offenders, that means five dozen people hawk a gob of dead Doublemint each day.
On the scale of antisocial acts, it's not something that portends a descent into brutish anarchy, but c'mon. Unless 64 people each day suffer an unexpected clap on the back by an old friend and bark out a bolus, there's no excuse.
An earlier tweet: "Since its inception, MDID has removed more than 463,000 gum spots in #DowntownMpls." That's almost HALF A MILLION gum spots. Without the DID, walking downtown would be like strolling through the tar pits. Sorry I'm late for work, boss, but I got stuck on 7th street. The DID crew threw me a rope and I tied it around my waist and they pulled me out. Lost a shoe, too.
Suggestion: Instead of cleaning it up, give every DID ambassador the legal authority to enter Parent Mode, grab a gum-spitter by the earlobe and make the masticated putty-hawker clean up the mess.
Really, what is the matter with people? Spitting out gum on the sidewalk. In my day, no one did that. They put it under the restaurant table or movie-theater seat, like civilized folk.
