What was going on when I was born?

When President P. W. Botha addressed white followers in Durban Thursday night to speak of what he calls racial reform, he told them South Africa was crossing the Rubicon. The message was not lost on the black majority, either. But where Mr. Botha seemed to build visions, or a chimera, of a new and harmonious nation on the other side of the momentous divide, the signal to blacks was different. Excluded last year from a new Parliament opened to limited participation by Asians and people of mixed race, and with some black townships under virtual siege by the army and the police, some blacks saw Mr. Botha's speech as possibly the final rebuff. Result Could Be War His talk struck many as a distillation of white intransigence heralding war, not peace, and a sign, if one was needed, that South Africa's leader would not talk to those whom blacks consider leaders of equal or greater stature, such as the imprisoned nationalist Nelson Mandela.

Like many other farmers here in the grain belt, E. W. Dixon was smiling today as he examined long, fat ears of corn in fields that now seem sure to give him one of the best crops he has ever produced. ''You have to feel good,'' he said, ''when all your planning and work and expense pays off with a crop like this.'' Seven out of 10 corn producers will benefit, like Mr. Dixon, from an enormous corn crop this year, despite declining prices. Not only did they sign up last spring for a Government program that provides subsidies to help offset the price slump, but the benefits they receive under that program will also be multiplied by their increased yields. Fear of Increased Spending But the size of the national crop is dismaying news for the remaining corn growers, who declined to seek the Government price protection. For many of those farmers, increased yields cannot offset the price slump.

Despite spot power problems Thursday in lower Manhattan and northern New Jersey, the utilities serving both areas have access to far more electricity than they are likely to need this summer and have little fear of systemwide blackouts, according to officials. But, those officials said, demand has grown enough to overwhelm electrical distribution equipment in scattered areas. Utility spokesmen said yesterday that they were not sure of the precise causes of Thursday's problems, but that any equipment that was prone to fail by overheating would be most likely to do so on a day like Thursday, when the weather reached 95 degrees and when record demand strained cables and machinery. The officials, however, stressed that, even if parts of the distribution system failed to handle the load, there was enough generating capacity and enough large transmission lines to provide power where it was needed.

The collective farm chairman lost his job and his Communist Party membership and now faces trial on criminal charges. Three of his subordinates also lost their jobs. Their crime: feeding bread to pigs. The very notion has an almost sacrilegious ring to Russian ears. Pigs, after all, are pigs, and bread is not only scarce, but a national symbol. In the phrases of songs and poems often heard here, bread is gold, it is the motherland, it is the hard work of the masses, it is life itself. Bread is credited with saving the starving people of Leningrad during the blockade in World War II. One poet put it this way: Bread, that pure, that sacred word. Bread, our very lives. In a village cafeteria in Siberia hangs a poster that reads: ''Bread is the warmest, kindest of words. Write it always with a capital letter, like your own name.''

Construction of new housing, an important gauge of future economic activity, fell a surprising 2.4 percent in July, the Commerce Department reported yesterday. The drop in what are known as housing starts - the beginning of construction on new single or multifamily dwellings - was the latest in a series of indicators showing that the economy is not rebounding from the disappointing first six months of the year. Building permits, an indicator of future activity, fell nine-tenths of 1 percent in July following a 3.7 percent decline in June. And in another indication that the economy is failing to regain momentum, the Government reported yesterday that factory operating rates were unchanged in July for the fourth consecutive month. [Page 36.] 1.65 Million Annual Rate The Commerce Department reported that, in July, new housing was started at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.65 million units.

In a stinging reply to President P. W. Botha, Bishop Desmond M. Tutu said today that the prospects for peaceful change in South Africa were ''virtually nil'' and that the nation was ''on the brink of a catastrophe.'' Bishop Tutu made the assessment, his gloomiest yet, in reaction to what he and many other blacks and opponents of the Government's racial policies viewed as a dismaying lack of significant changes offered in an address by Mr. Botha Thursday in Durban. No Concessions Seen Critics said that instead of offering major concessions, Mr. Botha merely repeated existing policy and provided only vague hints about the possible relaxation of some of the building blocks of apartheid. [Senior Reagan Administration officials said they were disappointed at the lack of concessions to the black majority by Mr. Botha, but they said he offered the possibility of negotiations as an alternative to violence.

The president of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation resigned yesterday after telling city officials he was under criminal investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney. The president, John J. McLaughlin, in his resignation letter to Deputy Mayor Stanley Brezenoff, did not say what the investigation involved, and he could not be reached for comment. Thomas J. Puccio, Mr. McLaughlin's lawyer, said in a telephone interview that the investigation grew out of a civil suit involving Mr. McLaughlin, and that ''as far as I know, it did not involve Mr. McLaughlin's position in city government.'' A 'Personal Tragedy' Mary de Bourbon, a spokesman for the District Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, said a grand jury was investigating Mr. McLaughlin, but she would not say what the investigation concerned.

The chairman of a House subcommittee with jurisdiction over Latin American affairs wrote a letter to the White House today asking for all records about the involvement of a National Security Council official with the Nicaraguan rebels in the last year. The letter, from Representative Michael D. Barnes, Democrat of Maryland, head of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, concerned the activities of Lieut. Col. Oliver L. North. Mr. Barnes also said in his letter that ''it would be stretching the integrity of the law to suggest'' that the involvement did not violate the letter or the spirit of the law that prohibited involvement with the rebels.

The chairman of the Greenpeace environmental group said today that a new ship, much larger than the one sunk in New Zealand last month, would leave Amsterdam Sunday for the South Pacific to protest French nuclear tests in the region. The new ship, called Greenpeace, is a 218-foot converted oceangoing tug bought earlier this year for $500,000. It was originally acquired for a voyage to Antarctica. ''Whoever is responsible for the bombing of our ship should know that their attempt to stop our nonviolent opposition to nuclear weapons testing has not succeeded,'' the chairman, David McTaggart, said.

When the United States and Canada announced plans last spring to overhaul the North American air-defense system, the news evoked little enthusiasm from the people who live in the region. The Baffin Islanders, who inhabit the barren, mostly Arctic island between the Canadian mainland and Greenland, felt as if they had seen it all before. The radar stations of the original Distant Early Warning line, or DEW line, were built in the 1950's to give advance notice of Soviet bomber attack. Although the system changed the face of the Arctic, creating new communities in the Baffin region like Hall Beach, it did not usher in the prosperity and jobs expected by the Inuit, as Canada's Eskimos are called. Technicians imported from the south have done most of the work.

The Boeing Company has advised the 70 airlines using 747 jetliners throughout the world that as a result of the crash of a short-range 747 in Japan on Monday they might want to inspect tail sections of the planes they operate. Officials of four of the dozen American airlines that fly the 747 - T.W.A., United, Pan Am and Northwest Orient - said yesterday that even before Boeing's action, they had begun their own inspections. In Washington, meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration said yesterday that it would await more information on the Japan crash, in which 520 people died, before deciding whether to order inspections of 747's flown by domestic carriers.

Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze today proposed a United Nations-sponsored international conference intended to prevent the military use of outer space. In a letter to the United Nations Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, which was published in Moscow, Mr. Shevardnadze said the conference, to be held no later than 1987, would consider the establishment of a world space organization to control the peaceful uses of space. The primary goal of the conference, he said, would be to halt what he called the militarization of outer space, a term he said ''implies renunciation by states of the development, testing and deployment of space strike weapons.''