I read that President Trump has ordered that the Treasury Department stop minting the penny. His argument that they’re wasteful is logical enough, the production cost of a penny is more than two cents. Look it up: 3.2 billion pennies were made in 2024, in 2023, 4.1 billion and in 2022, 5.8 billion. In three years, 13.1 billion pennies! You’d think people would be drowning in them. (It’s not an original Trump idea; lawmakers have talked about it for decades.)
The penny was a marker for me, defining one of the now far-off boundaries of my mental territory. As a child, I bought “penny candy.” There was a store down the street from our house where, for a penny, you could choose from endless options. One that I liked was a roll of white paper about two inches across with dyed sugar dots on them. For a penny the vendor would tear off a couple of inches from the roll. Another was a single licorice stick; another, individual lemon drops.
The penny’s disappearance is a minor event in the psycho-cultural orientation of American society, yet it’ll cause ripples. Consider the phrases “a penny for your thoughts” or “a penny saved is a penny earned.” Both will drop out of the American vocabulary. What does this say about thinking and saving?
If approached from a logical point of view, even nickels and dimes have almost zero value, five or 10 times nothing is still nothing. If we got rid of them however, there goes, “he’s nickel and diming me to death.” It would also render the lines “put another dime in the jukebox, baby” or “gave the bum a dime in your prime, didn’t you” unintelligible to future generations.
Taking this reasoning a step further, the dollar has almost no value other than a tip for a beer. However, I think the dollar will be around for a long time. The dollar’s symbolic shorthand for the entire edifice of the United States, thus the ongoing battle to keep it as the world’s currency. The expression “the almighty dollar” has intense symbolism. Consider expressions like “the buck stops here,” a saying President Reagan kept on his desk in the Oval Office. If there are no bucks, does that mean there’s no accountability? Or the classic lament of the tired laborer, “another day, another dollar.” The dollar has almost no value: what does that say about the days we plod through to earn them? Finally, there’s “a buck’s a buck,” the statement of irreducible reality. If there were no bucks, within the economy of that phrase, reality itself disappears.
Like the penny, as we go through life many of the things by which we organize our temporal reality disappear. I recall fields in the country that are now filled with prefabricated houses. Endless buildings and shops in downtown Baltimore now razed to the ground, and most importantly, people that I loved, gone forever. Change is unavoidable but there’s a danger. If things change too quickly or violently, this causes anomie. Considering this, one would think people would be thankful that, unlike the penny, some things are beyond our capacity to change into disposable signs. Only a madman gets mad at gravity, or that we can’t fly by flapping our arms, or that we must eat, for these aren’t man-made like pennies, but realities.
It’s difficult for me to see the ongoing gender debate other than in this light. What does it say about a society that chooses to redefine a hard reality as a malleable sign? For if taken to its furthest point, this suggests that all realities can also be modified. If someone said breathing was a choice, how should we react?