10) The Eighties

John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of President Reagan was often in the news throughout 1982. He came from a wealthy family, his father was in the oil business. His brother and sister were both highly successful. Yet, he ended up as a drifter who finally shot the president, after watching a movie involving an assassination attempt, in an effort to be somebody.

He was ultimately found not guilty by reason of insanity. It is not as if he was getting away with anything, he was confined to a mental hospital where he remains today.

I was giving religion much more of my time and thought. I was anything but a blind follower and I often questioned my own beliefs. I ended up with the set of beliefs that I have today because it was those beliefs that made it through my questioning. Years of reading about science had given me a logical way of thinking. I never had any trouble believing in God and never saw any contradiction between logic and faith.

But I wondered, for example, about the power of faith in itself. Regardless of what one had faith in. One evening, I was sitting in a car waiting for someone. It was raining heavily and the rain on the windshield distorted the lights all around into bizarre shapes and forms.

What if I really had unshakable faith that the lighted shapes and forms seen through the winshield were the true reality and that what we saw ordinarily was only an illusion? Would this faith then become an entity in itself and the things that I had faith in would become real just because I had faith in them?

But then why should we want to believe in something just for the sake of believing in it? My logical thought is that the only reason that we should believe something is because it is true. Just the fact that people have always been looking for something to believe in shows that God created us to worship him.

I now understood what the Nazis and Communists had done. They had taken people who, for the most part, no longer believed in God and they had done a magnificent job of giving them something else to believe in. And God allowed the world wars to happen as tribulation for the growing disbelief.

I saw that when people don't believe in God, they just put something else in his place. Instead of serving God and going to Heaven, they will replace it with "having it made". They will put their "faith" in wealth or pleasure or their mate or intoxication in some form. Instead of worshipping God, an unbeliever might "worship" nationalism or an ideology or a leader.

Some who do believe in God only believe enough for the comfort of something to believe in without any of the demands. While the main reason for not believing in God is either that a person is living a sinful life and does not want any God to answer to or a person is disappointed about something and is "punishing" God by not believing in him.

I soon realized two things.

First, to really grasp God it is necessary to see how very different are the ways of God from the ways of the world. The two are not even on the same page.

Second, there is absolutely no connection between intelligence and goodness in people. In the worldly, conventional wisdom way of thinking, there is a close correlation between intelligence and goodness and if evolution were true, this would also be the case. But in God's way and in the reality of the world, there is absolutely no correlation whatsoever.

There is no better example of the vast difference between the ways of God and the ways of the world than Jesus himself. The life of Jesus was foretold in the Hebrew scriptures, the old part of the Bible. They waited and waited for their messiah. But when he came, they had him executed.

Jesus enraged people and got himself crucified because he turned everything upside-down. Except that it wasn't really upside-down. It was actually right-side-up, it was the world's way of thinking that was upside-down. He shined a light on the fact that it was the ways of the world that were upside-down and for this he was condemned.

Before being a Christian, I thought that Jesus was the ultimate authority figure. But nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus was actually the ultimate radical.

By the time of Jesus, the Israelites thought that their religious rituals, their temple and the fact that they were descendents of Abraham made them right with God. They awaited their messiah, thinking that he would free them from hated Roman rule.

In the worldly, conventional wisdom way of thinking, the savior or messiah would be well-born into a priestly family. He would be educated by the best teachers at the finest school. He would be dressed in the shiniest imported silks. If he was killed, it would be by criminals and sinful people.

But that is not what happened, in fact it was just the diametric opposite. Jesus never went to school. He worked at mundane jobs before beginning his ministry. He was not a member of the religious establishment at all. He never owned anything but his clothes.

This was to show that God does not need all of this worldly wealth and splendor. A simple wood worker, with the wisdom and power of God in him, was the Savior that is now the most influential human being that has ever lived. This was the difference between right-side-up and upside-down.

Most importantly, it was not blatantly sinful people and criminals who got Jesus killed. It was, incredibly, the religious establishment and the so-called "respectable" people. So many of the most sinful people actually repented and followed Jesus. It was the establishment which felt threatened by his growing popularity, and resented how he pointed out their hypocrisy and emphasis on empty rituals, instead of having their hearts in the right place.

The ways of the world are still upside down. For one example, look at how we idolize someone because they can throw a ball or sing a song but truly good people, who are the real heroes, go unrecognized.

Just the fact that Jesus was crucified tells us a lot. The Jews at the time of Jesus had their own justice system, but they were not allowed to put anyone to death. If they felt that one of their own people had committed a crime worthy of death, they had to bring it to the Romans.

The religious establishment wanted to be rid of Jesus. If they could had discredited him in any, such as by proving that one of his miracles was a deception, they would gladly have done so. The fact that they went to all the trouble of dealing with their pagan occupiers in order to get him executed shows us that they were unable to discredit him any other way.

My idea of Christian theology centered on the idea of perfection. It was not about being good, it was about being perfect. Since God is perfect, not just good but perfect, he cannot accept anything which is less than perfect.

If we have a perfect ocean of water and a little bit of imperfect water to it, the whole ocean becomes imperfect. This is why Jesus explained that anyone who fails at one point of the law is actually guilty of breaking the whole law.

No ordinary person is perfect. People can be very good, but still not perfect. But God helped us along by sending into the world a very special person, Jesus, who was actually begotten from God and did not inherit the ordinary human sin nature.

If a person truly accepts Jesus as his or her savior, when God goes to judge that person he looks not at the person being judged but at Jesus, the person's savior, who had no sin.

Sin has to be punished. To leave sin unpunished would compromise God's perfect justice system and bring about imperfection. The Bible states that "the wages of sin is death".

But when God judges that person, he sees the death of Jesus on the cross as paying the price for that person's sin.

Take the rich man in hell in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 16, as an example. The man actually had quite a bit of goodness in him. He did not want his five brothers to arrive in hell, like he had. This goes to show that just being good is not enough, one must be perfect, and the only way to do that is to go through Jesus.

I also found it significant that John The Baptist, the herald of Jesus, was from a heriditary priestly family, while Jesus himself was not. That represents the end of the traditional priesthood, and the sacrifices for atonement which they offered, to make way for the once and for all sacrifice, the life of Jesus.

I decided to review the kind of music that I was listening to and did away with anything that was nasty or blatantly sinful. That was one good thing about Sixties music, it was mostly light-hearted romance songs.

During the Eighties, I really spent a lot of time with Sixties music. I had an ever-growing record collection and there are so many Sixties songs that today I associate with the Eighties, rather than the Sixties, because that is when I listened to them so much. But that does not mean that there was not a lot of great new music during the Eighties, because there was.

Around 1982, there was "Roseanna" by Toto. It was always on the radio.

I bought the album by The Police "Ghost In The Machine". The gloomy song on it "Invisible Sun" was about the troubles in Northern Ireland.

There was the mellow "Us And Them" by Pink Floyd.

And the just as mellow "Run For The Roses" by Dan Fogelberg

April Wine reappeared with "All Over Town".

The Stray Cats did "The Stray Cat Strut".

John Cougar Mellencamp sang "Jack And Diane".

"Kids In America" was actually by British singer Kim Wilde and it really had that Brit new wave sound to it.

A Flock Of Seagulls brought more new wave with "I Ran So Far Away".

There was "Tainted Love" by Soft Cell.

After The Fire did "Der Kommisar"

New wave music was a technical step forward from rock and disco. The perfection of electronic music made entirely new types of sound possible. I thought that the foundation of new wave might actually have been that old Sixties band, The Doors, with their extensive keyboarding.

I generally liked new wave music, particulary Blondie and "Kids In America", but did not have too much concern for putting definitions on every song I heard. I wondered about being a musician myself and bought a guitar at a pawn shop. But I had too many other interests and would just spend a few minutes with it now and then.

Then there was the oldies. I became friends with a couple who would play Sixties songs all evening and talk about the bands and music of that time. Even though it was the Eighties, I spent at least as much time listening to music from the Sixties and early Seventies as to contemporary music.

There was "Summer In The City" and "You Didn't Have To Be So Nice" by The Loving Spoonful.

"Double Shot Of My Baby's Love" by The Swinging Medallions

"This Diamond Ring" By Gary Lewis And The Playboys

"Judy In Disguise" by John Fred And His Playboy Band

"This Magic Moment" by Jay And The Americans

"Here Comes My Baby" by The Tremeloes (A beloved girl used to be called "baby")

There was no song that typified the music of the Sixties quite like "Bend Me, Shape Me" by American Breed.

The Monkees most rocking song was "Valleri".

"Catch Us If You Can" by The Dave Clark Five

That old favorite, "My Baby Loves Loving" by White Plains

Another old favorite, "A World Of Our Own" by The Seekers

"Where Have All The Flowers Gone?", which was done by a number of different bands.

Finally, two of the best songs ever made. "Just My Style" by Gary Lewis And The Playboys and "She'd Rather Be With Me" by The Turtles.

In 1982, there were two wars going on at the same time. Argentina made a surprise takeover of Britain's Falkland Islands and a task force was dispatched from Britain to get them back, in what became known as The Falklands War. Both countries were U.S. allies and Ronald Reagan tried unsuccessfully to mediate a peaceful solution.

While that was going on, another war broke out in the Middle East. Israel sent a force into Lebanon to eradicate the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). Yasir Arafat was not captured.

Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev died. He would be replaced by Yuri Andropov, who had once been in charge of the KGB. But he was old and ailing also and he would be premier for little more than a year. He was succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, who would also rule for not much more than a year. When he died, that represented the end of the "old guard" in the Soviet Communist Party.

I had not finished college at Buffalo State but took an interest in developing my industrial skills. I constructed extensive wooden shelves in our basement and was always interested in learning more about fixing and building things.

A law was passed that permitted turning right on a red light after the driver had determined that no more cars were going through the green light and it was safe to turn. This made driving easier. The number one car at the time seemed to be the Chevrolet Nova. They were everywhere.

I wanted to be in the U.S. Air Force. I did really well on the entrance exam, particularly the electronics section, and was supposed to be trained as an avionics communication specialist. This meant working on and testing the radio communications systems used in aircraft. But, I still suffered at times from a moderate amount of stuttering and they didn't want to give me the job, since a requirement for it is perfect speech.

The owners of the Kentucky Fried Chicken store where I had worked were opening up a combination restaurant and disco in a new mall, The Rainbow Center, right near the falls. I was put to work there.

It was called Scruples and was to be a restaurant during the day and then a disco after dinnertime. It was a nice place, adjoining what was then known as The Wintergarden so that the windows of Scruples seemed to be looking out into the tropics.

It was packed to capacity when it first opened. Being just past the American end of the Rainbow Bridge, it was very popular with Canadians, whose bars closed at 1 AM. In the summer, there were tourists from all over the world in there. In the winter, business inevitably dropped off but there was at that time what was known as A Festival Of Lights right outside that drew people downtown.

During dinner time, the album "Aja" by Steely Dan would often be playing in Scruples. But at night, this was the time when Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album had just been released. It was wildly popular and through the doors came an endless parade of black guys trying to look like Michael Jackson.

Actually, I think that his earlier album "Off The Wall" was technically better. Although "Thriller" sold more albums.

Another of the songs played most at Scruples was "Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats. But I got to where I was really tired of hearing it.

A very popular song of 1983 was "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel.

Another song was "Our House" by Madness.

"Keep The Fire Burning" by REO Speedwagon

1983 was a landmark year in entertainment. If for no other reason, it was the year we met the "Material Girl", Madonna, with the song by that name.

Madonna is, in many ways, the ultimate celebrity. She has managed to remain in the entertainment headlines, in one way or another, ever since 1983. Madonna has a way of continuously reinventing herself so that she is always right there in front of us.

It is like a magician who can make things disappear. But she is the opposite, making it so that she always appears, in one way or another.

In September of 1983, a South Korean passenger jet accidentally strayed into the airspace of the Soviet Union. A couple of Soviet military jets flew alongside it for a while. The military jets then seemed to have received an order to shoot it down. They dropped back and fired one or more missiles into the plane's engines. Everyone on board the plane was killed. Ronald Reagan angrily referred to the Soviet Union as "The Evil Empire".

There were soldiers from a number of nations in Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission following the war the previous year. The barracks of the U.S. Marines was bombed, resulting in a death toll of over two hundred. The French barracks was also bombed, but the toll was not as high.

There was a tank truck that would deliver water to the U.S. barracks. Militants got an identical truck and made the tank into a massive bomb. They then hijacked the truck that would be delivering the water and drove the bomb truck into the barracks. They then detonated the bomb.

Early in 1984, I brought about some changes. Maybe I felt bad about not finishing college. But I began to really do a lot of reading. I was already reading about religion and exercise and things like that, but I began much more broad general reading. I admired people who really knew a lot and wanted to gain all the knowledge I could. I saw more than ever before how knowledge is power.

I was into serious weight lifting. But I had long thought that of the mind, the body and, the spirit, the body is really the least important. I had managed to deadlift 500 pounds and bench press over 300 and physical fitness would remain a top priority all my life, but other interests were crowding in.

This passion for reading would lead to the writing that I do today. The best way to learn to write is actually by reading. I began concentrating on world events and began reading news periodicals. I wanted to know all about other countries and read National Geographic in particular, and also Readers' Digest. I could still read endlessly about science, particularly astronomy and archeology. That old book about ancient civilizations that I had brought from the Canadian side became valuable yet again.

I just wanted to know everything. But as I have always been, I was all-around and not too focused on any one thing.

I followed that continuing Iran-Iraq war until it finally ended.

I continued reading Christian books, particularly those of Hal Lindsey, Dave Hunt and, Joni Eareckson Tada. In a way, these can be considered as my spiritual mentors. I liked the artwork in Jehovah's Witnesses books and although I am not in this group, sometimes I would read these. I would also read the periodical, The Plain Truth, by The Worldwide Church Of God.

I had a strong sense of improvement. A person should do what they practically can to get better all the time. When it comes to things like exercise, quitting smoking, losing weight or, starting in a new direction, the best thing to do was to just decide what needs to be done, come up with a practical plan, and then just do it. We already know how to live good lives, the problem is that it is often things that we do not want to hear.

When I talked to people to any extent, I usually wanted to have some kind of productive and informative conversation. I did not want to talk about a bunch of nonsense or gossip about other people's business.

What about patriotism? Waving a flag is the easiest thing to do, anyone could do it. Furthermore, all of the modern countries of the world stand for roughly the same principles. What was really the difference in being American or Canadian or Japanese or, any brand of European? There were differences, of course. But the differences were minor, rather than major.

I thought that the way to be a patriot was to improve one's self, to live a better life. To keep improving. To bring more of God into the country. To be healthy and fit and well-informed.

But on the other hand, we should never be too sure of ourselves. In my opinion, the definition of a wise person is one that will thank you when you prove him wrong.

I was an immigrant. There were plenty of other immigrants or foreign students around. I had always studied the world atlas and the news and I saw these immigrants as an opportunity to get to actually know people from these other countries. Immigrants tend to have a broad world view and it is good to at least be exposed to different ways of thinking.

Immigrants are the only people in the world who actually chose their country, everyone else has no control over where they are born. The typical immigrant has to have more "get up and go" to move to the other side of the world. Every immigrant has a life pattern that bears at least some resemblence to mine.

I have definitely undergone some reverse culture shock. I realized how capitalism tends to increase the general level of nastiness that is permissible. Capitalism is based on competition. The system is productive, but a lot of people cannot compete without being nasty and this gets into the culture of a capitalist country.

All I can say is that it is wonderful to sit around with a bunch of well-informed people and have an intelligent discussion without anyone saying anything nasty.

Another factor is the new types of food that immigrants introduce. The average immigrant to America will live several years longer than the average person that was born in America. This is simply because of the tendency to keep eating their traditional foods. But by the second generation, when the usual processed and junk foods have caught on, this advantage has disappeared.

But even though I wanted to learn from other people, I was never a follower. I was always very individual and I could be influenced by someone in a positive way without necessarily taking on "the whole package".

In terms of politics, I was a Reagan anti-Communist. But in all honesty, this was mainly because I got the idea that Republicans were more Christian than were Democrats.

In the latter part of 1984, I worked in an automotive shop for a few months, as well as at Scruples. I first went to the Catholic shrine in Lewiston, NY, Fatima Shrine.

1984 was the year of the Los Angeles Olympics. Some countries had boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics because of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. As you might expect, Soviet Bloc countries retaliated by boycotting these Olympics and holding their own games.

Ronald Reagan was still popular and easily won reelection against Walter Mondale, who had been Jimmy Carter's vice president. The bloody carnage of the Iran-Iraq war showed no sign of ending. A millionaire Australian living in the U.S., Christopher Bernard Wilder, went on a killing spree of young women. Ronald Reagan made a joke about bombing the Soviet Union, not knowing that the nearby microphone was turned on (I wonder now if maybe he did it purposely).

There was a horrific massacre in a McDonalds in San Ysidro, California. India's Indira Ghandi had earlier attacked the minority Sikh's Golden Temple, but was assassinated by two of her bodyguards who were Sikhs. Also in India, deadly chemicals leaked from a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, killing thousands of people.

I had religious reasons for being interested in the news. I was very interested in the prophecies in the Bible about the end of the world. There was every sign that we were in the "Last Days" now.

Jesus was bound by prophecy to return within the same generation that Jerusalem came back under Jewish control after a long time ruled by Gentiles. There is no mistaking this, it was 1967. The prophecy does not say " when they come back to Israel", which was 1948. But to Jerusalem, which was not until 1967.

It is absolutely amazing that the Jews survived the long diaspora at all, being such a small group of people. But the prophecies stated that they would, and they did. It was prophecied how they would be persecuted during the diaspora. This persecution actually worked in their favor, keeping them from being absorbed by the host countries.

Bible readers for hundreds of years must have wondered how the final wars of the world will start over all that useless sand. But then oil was found under all that sand in the Middle East.

There has to be a "one-world system" in the final days of the world. Today, for the first time in history, instant global transactions move endless billions of dollars around the world every day. We are in a global village like no one could have imagined even a generation ago.

There has to be fearsome destruction in war in the final days. There will be one great nation that will be utterly destroyed by fire within one hour. Today, we have nuclear missiles that could very easily bring this about.

These are just a few items, I do not want to go into detail here. But how much of a coincidence can it be that this return of the Jews to Jerusalem, the one-world system and, the nuclear bombs all appeared in human history at about the same time?

The Bible reveals that after the sinful world is destroyed in this apocalypse, Jesus himself will rule the world directly and it will be the paradise that it was always intended to be. The whole reason for this and for allowing evil to exist is to demonstrate that the ways of God are right and the ways of Satan are wrong.

When Satan rebelled against God, it would require little effort for God to destroy him then. But that would only prove that God is more powerful than Satan. It would not prove that God is right and Satan is wrong. That is where the world comes in, to show that things only work out when done in God's way.

This subject of Bible prophecy has been so discredited by people reading too much into it or saying that the world will end on a certain day. But that is actually a part of the prophecies in itself and when one really studies this subject, it is absolutely amazing.

In music, there was "State Of Confusion By The Kinks"

"Panama" by Van Halen

"Dancing In The Ruins" by Blue Oyster Cult

In older music, I often listened to "Kicks" by Paul Revere And The Raiders

"When You Walk In The Room" by The Searchers

Early in 1985, I got another side job while I continued to work at Scruples. This time it was sweeping and mopping the Rainbow Mall, in which Scruples was located, at night. It was not the most desirable job, but it gave me the opportunity to do quite a bit of thinking.

The news that the ailing Konstantin Chernenko had died was no surprise. The new Soviet leader was Mikhail Gorbachev. He was much younger, in his early fifties. He had first appeared on the international scene when he had been sent on a trip to Britain in the autumn of 1984. I was halfway surprised that the long-time Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, never made it to the top position.

Gorbachev quickly began major changes. He realized that Communism needed to be reformed and began programs of Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness to the outside world). He became very popular in the west although he never acheived quite the same popularity in his own country.

Gorbachev affected me also. I followed his efforts at reform closely. I had very much a global way of thinking already and this further opened up my view of the world. I am certain that the Cold War would not have ended peacefully as it did without Mikhail Gorbachev.

I began working full-time in the spring at Classic Fence. Working with wood and fences provided more opportunity to learn practical skills and it meant working outside in the summer. I often did wood working on my own and had an ever-growing collection of tools. Fences cannot be built in the winter where I live and so getting laid off for the cold part of the year provided an opportunity to do a lot of reading.

I had belatedly realized the power of the mind and wanted to learn all that I could. A person should seek knowledge throughout life, and not just in school. Wherever a person is, there will be opportunities to learn something new.

I still would go to bars on the weekends, although not often and I had stopped drinking alcohol. I would just get a Coke.

The Late Show was still there and there was the Club Miami just down Main Street. Third Street was an area with a lot of bars. Night clubs seem to operate best when they are in groups. That way people can hop from one to another. Bars don't last forever, soon people get tired of them and want to go to a new place. Bar owners often close one down and open another.

In 1985, the Reagan Administration was undergoing a large military buildup. The idea seems to have been to force the Soviet Union into an arms race that it couldn't afford. The buildup centered around a program of fantastic and futuristic weapons that were to be deployed in space. It was dubbed Star Wars, after the movie.

At this point, my feeling is that the Star Wars program of the Eighties was mostly a bluff. Whoever heard of a small nuclear bomb in orbit that was sorrounded by lasing rods pointing outward? In the event of a nuclear missile attack, the bomb would be detonated. This would cause powerful laser beams to emanate from the lasing rods, which would destroy incoming missiles.

Come on, we are watching too much television.

Iran had gained the upper hand in the war with Iraq in 1984. It launched a new offensive in 1985 to follow it up, but the Iraqis managed to halt this offensive. The endless and deadly stalemate went on. They were too closely matched for either one to manage to defeat the other, so the war just dragged on.

Violence in India between Sikhs and Hindus was in the news continuously. The goal of the Sikh was an independent country called Khalistan.

The previous year, Indira Gandhi's troops had raided the Golden Temple of the Sikhs but then two Sikh bodyguards had managed to assassinate her. In the deadliest act of terrorism involving an aircraft in history, as far as I know, an Air India jet on the way from Montreal to London suddenly disintegrated and crashed in the sea near the coast of Ireland.

Coca-Cola introduced a change in it's formula known as New Coke. The response by the public left nothing in doubt. Get rid of this stuff and give us our old Coke back. Coca-Cola continued sales of the original Coke, now known as Coke Classic. The New Coke was on the shelves as well, called just that. The New Coke was later dubbed Coca-Cola 2.

There was a devastating earthquake in Mexico City. The news came that the wreck of the Titanic had been found. A massive series of rock concerts were held to raise money to alleviate the devastating famine in Ethiopia. Two major concerts were held in Philadelphia and London and smaller concerts in various other countries.

A frightful new disease appeared in the headlines. The disease destroyed the immune system and was almost inevitably fatal. It was spread by illicit sexual contact or sharing of needles during intravenous drug use. There was no vaccination and no cure. It was known by it's acronym, AIDS. Religious conservatives immediately pointed out that one must generally engage in sinful behavior to get this terrible disease, so we can assume that it is a judgment from God.

There was new music during 1985. "Obsession" by Animotion

"Dreamtime" by Daryl Hall

"Sunset Grill" by Don Henley

This was America and sooner or later, there had to be a band named after a gun, .38 Special.

But in 1985, I really got back into the music of the Sixties.

I bought the record "Expressway To Your Heart" by The Soul Survivors.

I did not remember the song "Friday On My Mind" by the Australian band The Easybeats from when I was a child. I somehow missed it. But I really became fond of it at this time.

Then there was "Time Won't Let Me" by The Outsiders.

And that old favorite from back when I lived in Canada, "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight" by Tommy Boyce And Bobby Hart.

1986 began with the death of singer Ricky Nelson. He had songs such as "Traveling Man", "Hello, Mary Lou" and, "Garden Party". He had also played the youngest brother on the old family show "Ozzie And Harriet".

Ricky Nelson was still doung a lot of concerts, although he has past the days when he was earning a lot of money. There was an old airplane that he used to get from one concert to another. The plane had crashed. They had old reruns of Ozzie And Harriet on television all day.

There was soon another tragic crash. I was watching the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on television from John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Suddenly, something happened. It seemed to split in two and to leave two trails of smoke. At first, I wondered if this was something that was supposed to happen. The shuttle had actually exploded, killing all astronauts aboard.

Down in Haiti the ruler of the country, Jean-Claude Duvalier, was overthrown by a popular revolt and went into exile in France. Haitian taxi drivers in Montreal were so elated that they all stopped their taxis, bringing traffic on many main roads temporarily to a standstill.

Duvalier, known as "Baby Doc" was the son of the previous ruler, "Papa Doc". Doesn't this seem just like a miniature version of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, who had followed his father on the throne?

Before we knew it, another autocratic ruler was overthrown and went into foreign exile. This time it was the long-time president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos. He went off to exile in Hawaii, accompanied by wife Imelda, who was famous for her vast collection of shoes.

The world was introduced to the star of democracy that replaced him, Corazon Aquino. She was the widow of a former opponent of Marcos, who had been in the U.S. and had been gunned down at the airport as soon as he had landed back in the Philippines.

Then, there was more news. The U.S. had launched an air raid on Libya as punishment for it's alleged involvement in terrorist activities. In particular, the home of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi had been bombed. The Libyans reported that his adopted daughter had been killed.

Along the way came the worst news of all. The nuclear reactor at Chernobyl (now Chornobyl) had undergone a meltdown. The Soviet news agency, TASS, at first announced a "minor mishap" had occurred, but soon the scale of the disaster became apparent.

Due to the wind direction, Sweden was one of the first countries outside the Soviet Union to detect the radiation from the meltdown. Ultimately, it would even cause a moderate increase in detectable radiation in my native Forest of Dean in distant England.

The next thing we knew, the U.S. Government had been secretly selling armaments to Iran, which was, of course, still at war with Iraq. The money was then being used to help the anti-Communist guerrillas in Nicaragua, the Contras. This brought about a scaled-down version of Watergate, known as the Iran-Contra Scandal.

Iraq was seen as a Soviet client state. I have never been quite sure how close Iraq was to the Soviet Union back in the Cold War. Even though they may have had common cause, Moslems and Communists can only get so close to one another. But anyway, to the anti-Communist Reagan Administration, even Iran must have been preferable to Iraq.

The Iran-Contra Scandal was a scandal in Iran as well. America was still considered as "The Great Satan".

1986 brought what was perhaps the best song of the 1980s. "Cruel Summer" by Bananarama.

I still liked Sixties music. "I Had Too Much To Dream" by The Electric Prunes and "Silhouettes" by Herman's Hermits.

I did ever more reading, particularly when laid off from the fence company for the winter. I would often go to used book sales, sometimes buying former school books. Here is a few of the books that stand out in my memory.

A high-ranking Soviet defector named Arkady Shevchenko wrote a very good book about the inner workings of the Soviet Government before Gorbachev. The book was titled "Breaking With Moscow".

I read several science books by the Russian-born writer Isaac Azimov. He wrote so many books, he was like a machine that writes.

There was also the excellent "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan. It really brought the science of astronomy to the general public.

I went through biographies of The Kennedys, Gandhi and, Gaddafi. And books about business like "Grinding it Out" by Ray Kroc, the story of McDonalds, "On A Clear Day, You Can Still See General Motors" and a book about Ford, which I cannot remember the title of.

It seems best to me to be familiar with all major points of view, whether I agree with them or not. At least to see what other people believe. I read the Communist Manifesto, the Qu'ran (Koran), The Rig Veda, The Bhagavad Gita and, The Upanishads. I read part of Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

The thing I did not understand about the Qu'ran is that Moslems accept Jesus as a special prophet who had a virgin birth. Islam is, by the way, the only religion except Christianity which acknowledges Jesus. But Moslems feel that Christians are mistaken to take Jesus as the actual Son of God.

In my thinking, the very definition of a father is "he who causes a woman to give birth". If Jesus had a virgin birth, that can only mean that God (or Allah) is the one who caused Mary to give birth. A virgin birth of a special prophet has to be miraculous. So then, God must be the father of Jesus and Jesus must be his son. Both the Bible and the Qu'ran state that Jesus had a virgin birth. I do not see any other way to look at it.

One thing that most people do not realize about Moslems and Christians is how close they actually are. Of all the major religions in the world, these two are the most similar to one another. There is a close correlation between the way a Moslem tries to live his life and the way a Christian tries to live his life. If we have four people, a Christian, a Moslem, a Jew and, a non-religious person, the first three are far closer to one another than any of them are to the fourth.

In the Middle East, both Christians and Jews have often lived peaceably under Moslem rule. Today, a significant portion of the population of Egypt is Coptic Christian. The Qu'ran tells Moslems that Christians and Jews are "people of the book".

In earlier days, the two religions were actually more similar, at least in form if not theology, than they are today. Christianity is the one that has changed the most since that time. Remember that Moslems have not been as afflicted by secularism as Christians have. Moslems have never had a Darwin or a Hundred Years War to put people off to religion.

I also saw other parallels in Christianity and Islam. Terrorism and cults, for example. Someone in a Moslem country might join a terrorist organization in the same way that someone in a western country might join a cult or other fringe group. Terrorists and western cults are both rebelling against many of the same things.

The western media is yet another parallel. Moslem fundamentalists decry the bad influence of the western media. They might be surprised to know that they are only saying the same things that Christian fundamentalists in the west have been saying for years.

I would not hesitate to read books about why there is no God. One of the reasons that I became a strong Christian is that the arguments against the existence of God make so little sense.

I have never read as many classics as I would like, I am too busy with the Bible. But I did get in Tom Sawyer and Catcher In The Rye. For some reason, Catcher In The Rye was a favorite of both the man who shot John Lennon and the one who shot Ronald Reagan.

I was growing fond of Toronto, about 90 minutes drive away. I knew some people who lived there and tried to visit on a regular basis. In 1986, I first went up the CN (Canadian National) Tower. It was, at that time, the highest free-standing structure in the world. This was truly a great city. There were other great cities also, but not one that I could drive to in 90 minutes. I always wanted to take a train up to Toronto, but so far I never have.

1987 in America was really a throwback to the Sixties. But it had nothing to do with music. 1987 was when America seemed to come to terms with the Vietnam War. Previously, there had been little discussion about the war. This war was always in the news when I was a child yet, I knew far more about the Second World War than I did about what actually happened in the Vietnam War.

There were suddenly several movies about it. Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Hamburger Hill. There was a lot on television about the war and a serial taking place there.

I read a number of books about the war, both factual histories and novels.

Another book that I happened across in 1987 was Manson In His Own Words. This was basically the autobiography of Charles Manson, whose gang had committed murders in Los Angeles in 1969 that shocked the country. After reading that, I read the book already in print about it, Helter Skelter.

The only new song that really comes to mind from 1987 is "Pump Up The Volume" by Marrs.

There was plenty of news in 1987. There were clashes between Iranian patrol boats and the ships that Ronald Reagan had sent to keep the Persian Gulf safe for shipping. The U.S. retaliated for attacks by destroying Iranian oil platforms. The crews on the platforms were always warned first and given time to evacuate.

A major cult was in the news. This one in the town of Antelope, Oregon and run by a native of India, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. It did not end as badly as Jonestown but the Bhagwan had accumulated quite a collection of Rolls Royces.

One word became very familiar on the evening news: Intifada. This was an uprising in Palestine against Israel. Palestinians throwing stones and bottles of gasoline would be a news staple for quite some time. At the same time, there was a similar uprising in South Africa seeking majority rule.

Finally, the inevitable happened. The worst stock market crash in America since 1929. Reagan had now been governing for nearly seven years. He was very pro business. The trouble is that if wealthy people are allowed to have things their own way too much and for too long, it is not good for either them or anyone else.

In my view, this is simply because most goods and services are produced for consumption by the average person. When the wealthy take too much money for themselves, and pay workers too little, there comes a point where there is not enough money in circulation to buy all of the goods and services that have been produced.

Since it makes no sense to produce goods and services that are not going to sell, factories cut back on production, meaning that workers have even less money, and it spirals into a crash. That is what happened in 1929, as well as 1987 and would happen in 2008.

One thing that all three of these crashes have in common is that they came after two consecutive Republican presidential terms. The far right Republicanism of Reagan and George W. Bush is a throwback to the 1920s. The more moderate Republicanism of Eisenhower, Nixon and, Ford did not produce any such crashes.

In politics, I had now seen how destructive it was to go too far left, in the late Seventies in both the U.S. and Britain, and now how equally destructive it was to go too far right. I had been a Republican but had noticed that they represent the few people making a lot of money and their mission is to just do whatever they have to do and say whatever they have to say to keep it that way.

But this is not good for anyone in the long run, wealthy people included. The whole economic system depends on consumer spending and when people do not have enough money to buy all the goods and services that have been produced, a recession results.

Too much capitalism also brings out the nastiness in people because the system is based on competition and a lot of people cannot compete without being nasty. It was said of the Eighties that "the only sin was not to win".

Conservatives and Republicans do have a point when the other side goes too far leftward. The predominant sign that an economic system has gone too far to the left is inflation. This hinders lending and cuts into people's purchasing power, also leading to recession.

In early 1988, I decided to move on and got a job in a factory. Thermal Foams made foam insulation and was on Kenmore Avenue in Kenmore. In the summer, I found a higher-paying factory job at Carborundum Abrasives closer to home near Niagara Falls Airport.

I was laid off from there for a time and I worked as a temporary worker at Cascades Paper, another factory. However by the time that was over, I was called back to Carborundum.

That was what factory work was like in the later 1980s. But at times, I miss being around the huge machinery of factories.

Factory paychecks gave me more money to spend on music. I found some more old Sixties songs that I really liked.

There was "Journey To The Center Of Your Mind" by The Amboy Dukes. I always presumed that they were from Perth Amboy, New Jersey but they were actually from Detroit.

I really liked "Starship Trooper" by Yes. For some reason, it always reminded me of the Vietnam War.

A really rocking oldie was "Hot Smoke And Sasafrass" by Bubble Puppy.

1988 started off with evengelist scandals. It had been Jim Bakker the year before. Jimmy Swaggart condemned him, but now it was Swaggart's turn.

The campaign was underway to determine the successor of Ronald Reagan. There was Reagan's vice president George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, the governor of that most Democrat of U.S. states, Massachusetts. There was also the outside possibility of our first black president with Jesse Jackson, who had actually been with Martin Luther King when he had been shot in 1968.

Mars was closer to earth than it had been in a long time or would be again for a long time. It was like a bright orange light in the evening sky. There was terrible drought in the U.S. in the summer of 1988. Japan was often in the news just for the ever-growing strength of it's economy.

The ship, U.S.S. Vincennes on patrol in the Persian Gulf, had accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger jet after mistaking it for an attacking military jet. All on board were killed.

That seemingly endless Iran-Iraq war finally did come to a negotiated end. Mikhail Gorbachev decided to begin pulling soldiers out of Afghanistan.

There is a saying that history repeats itself. Nowhere is that more true than in the endlessly fascinating country of Iran. This is a country which goes back about three thousand years. It has been a Moslem country for actually only about half of it's history. The coming of Islam to Iran meant the end of the pre-Islamic Persia.

But the interaction between the two halves of Iran's history still has not completely played out yet. The Revolution of 1979 was but a modern reenactment of the original coming of Islam to Iran. The Shah represented pre-Islamic Persia, in fact he had once held a grand celebration of ancient Persia in the ruins of Persepolis. Ayatollah Khomeini represents the new Islamic order that superseded the old Persia, but has never totally eradicated it.

In yet another example of history repeating itself, we have the resemblance between the situations of Martin Luther and Gorbachev. Both saw themselves as reformers and did not want to completely destroy the old order. Both men broke down the barriers to reform that were in their way. But after they had done that, neither was able to control the forces they had let loose.

Luther always considered himself a Catholic, but he saw that the church was in dire need of reformation. He never had any intention of creating rival churches. But once he had breached the wall of papal authority, he was followed by men like Calvin, Zwingli and, Knox who had no intention of reconciling with the Catholic Church and formed entirely separate churches.

In the same way, Gorbachev always considered himself as a Communist and only wanted modernization and reform. But once he had checked the authority of the old guard, he was supplanted by Boris Yeltsin, who jilted the Communist Party altogether. Yeltsin publicly destroyed his Communist Party membership card.

The story of Khomeini was not totally Iranian. I saw him as borrowing from Gandhi in that he successfully portrayed the Shah as not only an oppressor, but an agent of foreign oppressors.

In other news, There was an airshow of Italian military jets, the Frecce Tricolori, at the U.S. military base near Frankfurt in Germany. Two of the planes collided, spraying burning jet fuel all over the crowd watching from a nearby field.

In Pakistan, President Zia boarded a U.S. military C-130 cargo plane. Pakistan was considering purchase of a number of the planes. But someone managed to find out about Zia's itinerary and planted a bomb on board the plane. Zia was killed and it is still not known who did it.

The bonds binding the Soviet Union were loosening. But that was not all good news. The Armenians and neighboring Azerbaijanis (or Azeris) were not getting along very well. There was an enclave of Armenians, known as Nagorno-Karabakh, living in the midst of the Azerbaijanis. Those Armenians wanted to unite with Armenia, even though their territory was not contiguous. This set off a war that would last for a number of years.

The year ended with Armenia in the news for another reason, a deadly earthquake in Yerevan.

There is not a single song from 1989 that I recall while writing this. But there were plenty of oldies that I listened to.

I really liked that old Sixties instrumental "Out Of Limits" by The Marketts.

There was "Down By The Dam" by REO Speedwagon, that I happened across.

Billy Joe Royal is known for "Down In The Boondocks". But he had two other songs that were really good too, "Cherry Hill Park" and "I Knew You When".

No song would remind me of 1989 like "Maybe I Know" by Leslie Gore. I bought that record and would spend quite a bit of time listening to it.

I was forever reading. Here are a few more that I can recall from the late Eighties.

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is a classic of how human nature drives world events. It is one of my most-read books ever.

I read a number of books by Richard Nixon such as No More Vietnams and Real Peace.

There was the American Indian classic Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

I read several books, whose names I cannot now recall, about the KGB, the GRU and, Spetsnaz. The GRU was the Soviet military version of the KGB.

The Boy Scout Manual is actually a book that is full of practical knowledge. I really thought highly of it.

There was an excellent book all about the Apollo Space Program that I read. I wish I could remember the name of it.

I often went up to Toronto. The real-estate market there was red hot. Investors were all over hunting for properties to buy because prices were increasing so fast. Like all such bubbles, it couldn't possible last and it collapsed in 1990. But Toronto was still an awesome city.

1989 was absolutely jam packed with news. A devastating oil spill occurred when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska. The ailing Ayatollah Khomeini died on the same day as the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.

As the year proceeded, major world events seemed to come even faster. The protests in eastern Europe against Communism continued. East Germans were travelling to Hungary and then from there crossing into Austria, which was not a Communist country. This started the rapid series of events that led to the East German Government just declaring that the border was open and residents could come and go as they pleased.

The Berlin Wall had finally become irrelevant and would soon come down. What a day that was! I went to work at Carborundum Abrasives in the morning, unsure that was going to happen next and when I got out of work, the wall had been opened.

In all honesty, the real hero of this time was Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was when he made it clear that he was not going to support a crackdown that the government of East Germany just decided to declare the border open.

One country after another threw off it's Communist rulers. Poland had done so already. It looked like the one hold out might be Nicolae Ceaucescu of Romania. But it was not to be, his fall was the most spectacular of all. He was overthrown and executed on Christmas Day, 1989.

The collapse of Communism in eastern Europe was not totally good news. It turns out that Communism was all that was holding Yugoslavia together and when it disintegrated, the country disintegrated as well. It would be wracked by a nasty series of wars in the following decade.

George H.W. Bush held a summit with Gorbachev on Malta. Some workers at Carborundum had a television set up to watch a baseball game in San Francisco. Suddenly, the ground there began to shake. It was the Loma Prieta Earthquake that did so much damage.

Then came more news. The leader of Panama, Manuel Noriega, had ignored requests to crack down on drug shipments through his country. He often spoke out against the U.S. Government. George H.W. Bush sent an invasion force to topple Noriega. He took up refuge in the Vatican Embassy, but eventually surrendered.

The decade ended with a real shock. Marc Lepine shot and killed fourteen women at the University of Montreal and wounded many more. This can happen anywhere.

I did some more writing about the Bible prophecies about the last days of the world.