After a severe snowstorm, there is often a camaraderie among motorists and pedestrians alike as they struggle with the elements that is reminiscent of the feeling that a bicyclist would experience on the road during the 70's. For example, many times during the 70's, motorists would pull me over to ask questions about lighting systems. (During the winter, my commute was in darkness going both ways, so I have tried all manner of lighting.) Typical of the 80's, however, was an encounter I had after pulling up for the light at the intersection between Massachusetts Avenue and the Alewife Parkway. Because of the "right turn on red" law (which, like almost all laws for the road, was probably designed without any concern for the bicyclist), I was waiting on the line just outside the right lane as a car behind me and to my left vented an angry honk. I ignored him. But, deciding that I really had left enough room for his black Cadillac, he pulled along my left side. Then, having lowered his right window, he leaned across the seat and hollered "I can tell by the way you're dressed that you can't afford my car." I'm not very proud of what I said on that occasion and won't repeat it here.

With the 80's came a shift in attitude. The nod of respect that came with someone learning that you didn't claim the parking sticker to which you were entitled because you rode a bicycle became the supercilious smirk of someone discerning a sucker. Symbols used to convey values from one generation to another were twisted to serve purposes that mocked their origins. The American flag flew in its glory to advertise car lots but not to protect minority views. The Cross of Christendom was used by TV evangelists to exalt materialism and personal wealth, with a militaristic bent that surely had little to do with the teachings of Christ as taught to me by my preacher father. Patriots no longer asked what they could do for their country, but rather exuded a distrust of government and took pride in demanding that there be no new taxes. All this while making an ever greater demand that what taxes there were should go to support a bloated military. With its fine traditions symbolized by a flag raised at Iwo Jima but also by the Pentagon, the military became the engine of an illusory economic well-being, actually a sinkhole for funds borrowed from abroad. And, in the process, the virtues of capitalistic free enterprise, once symbolized by Wall Street but now by junk bonds, were perverted to the point where they threatened the very economic viability of our nation. Personal profit at public risk as encouraged by deregulation and then willful lack of supervision of the S&L's and insurance companies was surely America's free enterprise system turned upside down.

My position as the director of an academic laboratory, purposely dealing closely with industry, while surrounded by faculty colleagues having a wealth of experience ranging from the substance of scientific and engineering innovation to economics and public policy and with experiences in Washington and on Beacon Hill, allowed me to ask of people with a wide range of perspectives, "What on earth happened to us in the 80's?" Over and over again, at MIT and in industrial and academic settings across the country, over the past decade, I have embedded this question in widely ranging discussions. The answer is not that "The facts were not available to the people." Rather, it was that people had chosen to deny the facts.

Reagan made clear his economic plans as early as when Bush was yet his adversary in the 1980 Republican primary. Remember, Bush called Reagan's plan to balance the budget by cutting taxes "Voodoo Economics". And, how many administrations have had their Budget Director resign, like David Stockman, and write a book devoted to the disparity between image and fact in our economic planning? This was the same Stockman who in 1978 had already described energy self-sufficiency as a "Chicken Little logic" and recommended making foreign sources secure through "strategic forces".

To make my point as concerns our access to the facts, suppose that awareness of our economic situation were only gleaned from reading my office neighbor's Wall Street Journal? (Now that I can't make it to work, Richard Tabors has provided me with a gift subscription to the Journal.) The right-hand column of the Oct. 9, 1990 WSJ, the day of my second chemotherapy session, included a plot that had an all too familiar shape. In this case the vertical axis represented the indebtedness of American industry. From a distance, the curve starts out horizontal at the left, and then precipitously turns into a uniformly increasing straight line. Based on a half-decade of experience, I guessed that the horizontal axis was time, that the breakpoint came at about 1983 and that the curve carried through a year or so ago, when the data were last available. With my reading glasses, I could see my suspicions confirmed. In this case, the story told how the continual increase in indebtedness since 1983 now meant bankruptcy for many firms drawn into the junk bond vortex.

From articles featured in the Wall Street Journal over the past half decade, I have made transparencies of similar graphs for talks to various groups, all showing the precipitous march toward trouble that began in the time frame of 1983. One on Jan. 3, 1990 shows the public debt remaining level at about 140% of GNP precipitously starting an upward ramp in 1982 to reach more than 180% by 1989. The dire implications of the increase were already voiced by Mortimer Zuckerman in U.S. News and World Report on Oct. 9, 1989. "Since 1980, interest costs have increased over $100 billion, to $180 billion. If you add interest the government owes for borrowing from the trust funds, the real interest figure for 1990 is about $265 billion, and in two years will climb to about $300 billion -- roughly what America now spends on defense. Interest buys nothing but the right to continue the borrowing game." Yet another WSJ article, this time on the business page Sept. 18, 1987, featured Uncle Sam pulling an IOU rickshaw holding a Japanese businessman and gave some hint as to how a hemorrhage of US assets was one price paid for the borrowing. A table showed that our $137 billion in net overseas investment in 1982 had been reversed just four years later to become an overseas "investment" in the US to the tune of $263 billion.

As we entered the 90's, it was as though discovering another debt engendered during the Reagan years served to numb sensitivity to the previous revelations. The compromising of the Environmental Protection Agency with officials prosecuted for misappropriation of Superfunds was eclipsed by more nearly seeing the real cost of our nuclear weapons when the estimated $130 billion required for cleanup after decades of overproducing weapons was taken into account. The costs in loss of confidence by trusting citizens as they learned that their government had covered up their exposure to radiation can not be quantified. Then there was the HUD scandal, where the acknowledged $2 billion waste of tax funds could again barely reflect the cost in public confidence. Now, all of this seems to be overshadowed by the S&L fiasco with its more than $160 billion acknowledged lien on the future of our nation (probably even that is a gross underestimate).

More insidious was the rotting of our shortchanged infrastructure. Roads and bridges were allowed to decay, long ago not adequately supported by the gasoline tax. Acid rain was put on a "study now, pay later" plan and the AIDS and drug epidemics were similarly given head starts that would be paid for dearly in the future. State and local governments, under increasing pressure to pick up the responsibilities shunned by the federal government, found themselves confronted by popular shortsighted attitudes honed by Reagan and hence without resources for coping with the worsening K thru 12 educational crisis. And most corrupting, more of a time bomb than a mortgage on the future, was the increasing gulf between the rich and the poor.

My chemotherapy went well until the fourth weekly session, which had to be put off because of diarrhea, vomiting and mouth sores. That was the week when Gorbachev received the Nobel Peace Prize, and so it became a time to ask why Reagan had not shared the prize. It became a time to ask if the debts amassed during the 80's to build up our defense capability were not, after all, a fair price for ending the Cold War. Is it true, as Reagan would say a few weeks later in the dedication of a statue, commemorating Churchill's "Iron Curtain" address and celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, that Star Wars caused the USSR to change its military ways?

With the dramatic changes in Eastern Europe and the USSR in full view, I am embarrassed for commentators who pushed Reagan's confrontational policies during the 80's as they now try to claim that Gorbachev was moved to his Perestroika by the likes of Star Wars. If we, SDI and all, had been viewed as a real menace, would Gorbachev have trivialized the supposed threat as he did? The Nobel Peace Prize was not Reagan's but rather went to Gorbachev for turning his back on the military confrontation and simply walking away, leaving us red-faced for lack of an enemy and holding a bulging bag of indebtedness. To believe that the Soviets would react to threats by laying down their arms is to believe that they are not a people akin to us. These are the people who turned back Hitler at Stalingrad in the most brutal of military conflicts. Gorbachev was compelled to do what he did, but by an economic, not a military, threat. Yes, Communist economics had floundered. But, proving that it is our problem as well, we deny the dangerous overcommitment of our resources to a military establishment that is akin to one that propelled the economic demise of the USSR.