Just the other day, I was driving through the alley behind my house and saw a perfectly good kids’ kitchen play set among the rest of the garbage. I looked at it and wasn’t sure what to think.

When I was a kid, I used to think that my dad was cheap because he would always try to fix things around the house. Buying something new “just because” wasn’t in his vocabulary. This contemporary idea of upgrading just wasn’t in his mindset. Rather than “upgrading,” he would fix something, run it into the ground and, then, buy a newer version. I can’t tell you how long it took us to get a TV with a remote control.

As I’ve grown older, this sort of frugal mindset is something that my dad has passed down via osmosis to me. Maybe it’s just that these silent lessons on frugality, finally, made sense to me. When you’re in an immigrant family, where the parents are working their asses off to provide for their kids and watch each penny to give them better opportunities, you don’t even think of throwing something away that is still usable.

I saw this on a larger scale. My dad worked around 40 years for one of the Big Three. I remember that he would bring home things like towels that were thrown away. He would rather we use them than get thrown away. Just recently, I found out that a set of tough scissors able to cut through dryer pipe were ones that he picked up at work. They were too beat up and their previous owner was going to throw them away. My dad ended up using them and, now, another set of hands is using them.

On a professional and on a personal level, I hate the idea of waste. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not perfect. However, I’ve set it as an ideal to thoroughly use what I have. When my clothes are no longer something that I can use, I give them away. A few months ago, I bought a new computer mouse and gave my oldest one to a co-worker. Why? I didn’t need it any longer.

We are living in challenging times, when the Big Three almost didn’t make it and we’re looking at the chance of our federal government shutting down. If we can’t practice what we expect our high-level business owners and politicians to do, then I don’t know how we’ll revitalize our great country that truly is the land of opportunity and plenty. Nobody ever said that having plenty is an excuse to waste it.

Author: José A. Rodríguez