Power to the People, Eighth Graders Punished for Using Pennies
A group of eighth graders stood up and protested against a regulation that they felt unjust,
and at the same time made a great statement about a monetary unit that is now outmoded because of increases in inflation and an increases in material costs. The eighth graders are being punished because they didn’t go through the proper channels.
While the proper method of submitting a formal complaint might make sense to a principal who is serving in the bureaucratic nightmare that is the current US education system, the kids, who are now serving for a non-crime of paying for a service with legal tender, have not had the advantage of years of dealing with a broken system to be able to rationalize its broken features.
That might be taking it a bit too far, but really, these students didn’t do anything wrong. When the local board of education made the length of the lunch, they did so on the assumption that nobody would pay with pennies, that lunch ladies could process the kids fast enough, or that nobody would catch on their game of getting the cattle through the line as fast as possible. I do feel sorry for these kids.
In light of this event, we are left with two ways forward: Punish people who use pennies, or stop the US treasury from making them.
In the meantime, I call on all Americans—or readers of this blog—to use pennies as often as they can.
