You’re sitting in class, the clock ticking away as you reach your hands under your desk to pull your chair in. Suddenly, you find yourself playing “Where’s the Gum?” and—lucky you—it’s EVERYWHERE. You pull your hand back only to rub against more damp, grotesque balls of saliva and mouth-gunk. In disgust, you look under the table to find an endless mound of multi-colored pudge covering every inch of the desk. Each individual piece of gum covered in hair, teeth marks, mucus, maybe even THE PLAGUE? 

Eww!

This epidemic is a staple of the high school experience. It has left its stain on the world and caused many to lose their faith in humanity and beg, “Why?”

Why must this apparent evil ruin lives on a day-to-day basis? Is the trash can too far? How much gum do you own? Are you saving the gum in your cheeks for the winter? These menaces are the same type of people who leave their shopping carts in the middle of parking lots.

It’s almost as if these gum spreaders find enjoyment in the suffering of others. Do they require so much constant stimulation that they can’t keep the gum in their mouth for five extra minutes after it has lost its flavor until it can be disposed of civilly?

It is absurd to think that there are hundreds of students who view themselves as so important that they are above the laws of common decency and don’t need to throw out their chewed-up disease spreaders.

Likely, it is only a few people ruining it for everyone else. But why? In a perfect future all desks would be electric and would subject you to the harshest form of corporal punishment for vandalizing them.

Even worse, it doesn’t stop at just the desks. Chairs, walls, pillars—anything that is capable of holding gum is likely covered in layers of dried mouth putty.

Yummers.

With the power to buy gum, there must also be the responsibility of disposing of it correctly. So why can’t these gum-obsessed goblins? Is the feeling of taking your chewed, wet slab of disgust out of your mouth so pleasurable that you want to share it with the world?

We share a school with preschoolers and it seems that they are more responsible with their trash than the majority of the student body. The freshman class is typically given the blame for these kinds of immaturities, but finding gum in junior-senior classes proves that’s not quite true. Just take a look in any classroom campus-wide, the invasion of everyone’s personal space with these pink monstrosities is unbelievable.

Contrary to what these villains might think, there is no gum cleaner, no maid or servant scraping the gum off the desks. The solution to this has been to simply ignore the years-old reminders of human regression. It wouldn’t be surprising if there were pieces of gum from the mouths of the first graduating class continuing to stick around on campus.

Touching gum under a desk is like seeing someone litter. It is pathetic. The secondhand embarrassment of sharing a space with someone who can’t throw out their trash is undeniable. It is up to us as sane members of the student body to make workspaces and common areas as usable and comfortable as possible. So please, next time your Juicy Fruit has run out of flavor, spit it out into the trash. For all of our sakes.

This story was originally published on Hagerty Journalism Today on November 11, 2024.