Unfinished Business

Unfinished microwave installation

If my life has a recurring theme, it has to be “unfinished business.” I am a great project starter, but not such a great project finisher. At least outside of work. (Don’t want any past, current, or future employer getting the wrong idea).  Craft projects, writing projects, house improvement projects, gardening projects and even self-improvement projects. Sometimes I am like the hunting dog that starts off down the trail and then gets distracted by a rabbit or a squirrel and forgets what she is doing.

Only lately have I come to think that this may not just be something I have a problem with, but may be symptomatic of the baby boom generation. Surely on an individual basis, we fill out an entire spectrum for “unfinished business,” but as far as finishing some of the “projects” I thought we were going to tackle, the baby boomers still have work to do.

There is a list of things that still need work — equality, justice, violence, poverty, the environment — and those are just a few of the high level things we thought we were going to fix.  Back in 1970, on the first Earth Day, it seemed that if we could only clean up pollution and recycle stuff,  that would save the day. Although scientists had been mentioning it since the 1800s, we were unaware of  “climate change” or the disappearing ozone layer, or oxygen deserts in the ocean.

Those of us who were young women in the 70s, were fierce about our rights to be in the workplace, earn equal pay for equal work, and not tolerating male colleagues who thought it was OK to pat us on the behind if we stooped at the water fountain in the hallway. Our vision of racial harmony was a world of diverse neighborhoods, schools and workplaces, where people were valued for the “content of their character.” And we never imagined that a day would come when people would fly airplanes into skyscrapers, gun down children in classrooms, or proclaim that their religion supported reviving slavery.

And yet, we are the generation who “lost their innocence” when Kennedy was killed. Seeing the adults in my life break down and cry, combined with all the nuclear bomb drills at school made me feel as if the end of the world was at hand. Yet, somehow this faded to the back of our collective consciousness.  I realize of course, that I may have been more sheltered than others, or possibly too busy dealing with the dysfunction in my own family to really grasp what was going on the world. However, as I look back on what I perceived as the things my generation was going to cure, there is no getting around it, there is “unfinished business.”  And perhaps this has been the legacy of every generation, to just pick up where the last one left off, and carry the idea as far as they can.