HOW HAS THIS happened? How can we sit by quietly and watch our government commit crimes around the globe that would have had us pouring into the streets as little as three years ago? How do we ignore the cries of the hungry, the oppressed, the poor? I refuse to believe that we are any less moral than before, that our hearts cry out for justice less than in the past.

But our hearts, our minds and our actions are no longer so closely linked as they were. Much of the blame must go to the Nixon Administration. At no time in history had the aims of the White House been so consistently alien to the values of the people as during Nixon's reign of terror. He delivered packaged death to Vietnam and we protested; he sliced away at the programs that helped the poor, and we cried out in pain. But never had contempt for youth been so clear in such powerful places as it was during the Nixon regime; never had so many of the government's facilities been employed to strangle opposition, Never had corruption and evil been so clear, and yet so seemingly invincible; never had justice been in so broad a retreat. Faith is a fragile commodity; for many of us, I think, what little faith we had in the system shattered as, despite his crimes. Nixon increased his power in 1972.

And so we were more subdued as the Watergate tales unfolded before us, slowly eating away at the mask Nixon liked to call his "mandate." We were numbed by our past experience, and none of it seemed too incredible--except perhaps the man's persistence.

As historic and as just as the resignation this summer may have been, it provided only momentary relief--only until one realized that the man who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people had left office for what seems, in comparison, petty larceny. The men who had constructed the policies he had implemented stayed on, to inflict those policies on still thousands more innocent victims. John Dean was wrong: the cancer was not eating away at the presidency, it was the presidency, and its ravages have yet to be exterminated.

Yet for a while this summer, it seemed things could change. Here we had Gerald Ford; despite his long-time support for Nixon's Vietnam policies and his opposition to civil rights, there was still hope. Ford lost no time dashing it, pardoning his ex-chief's crimes and revealing the U.S. attempts to "destabilize" the Chilean government, leading to Allende's downfall. Ford only proved once more that the system, which has worked and unworked itself so many times in the past few years that it is hard to believe there is a system at all, belies our hopes.

THERE IS ALSO the fact that few of us are with-out self interests. What many of us do in the next few years we realize, will be controlled by the economy, and the economy, one would be led to believe, is largely beyond our control--beyond anyone's control. The barrage of news stories in print and on the airwaves about depression and rising unemployment are impossible to ignore completely, even behind the ivy lines. And despite President Bok's optimistic claim that "if you went to Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., you might have to worry about a job, but at Harvard you don't have to worry," many of our fears remain unstilled. We question what value our education will have when we leave Harvard's womb, and few of us can be certain of the answer. Some of us see, whatever other motives are involved, that lawyers and doctors are always in demand, and scurry off to professional schools; the rest of us wait and wonder.

In an Ambassador taxicab last year, Charlotte Curtis, the editor of The New York Times op-ed page, began arguing the value of an education with the driver. His eight years of Northeastern night school had gotten him nothing more than a piece of paper, he said; had he used his money to purchase a taxi medallion, he could have been a wealthy man, or at least driving his own cab.

"No, Mr. Ambassador, you can't mean that," Curtis said, and she tried to explain how a college education had enriched the man's life, but he remained unconvinced. He had not been able to find a better job, he said, only to hold more intelligent conversations with his fares.

For most of us, the real world is the problem we must face first, and the one that four years at Harvard have prepared us for the least. Despite our assumed intelligence, we get very little news; few of us have televisions, few of us read newspapers that give us a comprehensive view of what is happening outside Harvard. Only in educational institutions, mental asylums and prisons can one choose to shut himself off so completely from the world around him.

Too many of us have succeeded in doing just that. We learn in a vacuum about theories we will be hard-pressed to apply to our fives; we study for examinations and grades rather than for learning or for living Harvard, unfortunately, encourages that.

Many of us--too many of us--will emerge from the University's soft cocoon and find ourselves like the cabbie, bitter that the tools Harvard gave us do not bring much understanding in a world based more on the complex actions of people than on simple facts and figures: that achievement is based on living up to one's potential to help others, not on quantifying and analyzing them. Others of us will ignore our Harvard training and, finding the lessons the real world has to offer more interesting, start over. Still others will find a way to successfully mold the two together.

I OFTEN QUESTION the motives of journalists, including myself. They at once perform the easiest and most difficult jobs in the world: difficult, because they must face the real world every day, see its problems and hear its cries; easy, because they can hide behind a veil of objectivity and assume that because they are chronicling the world's pain, someone else will relieve it. This article is one example; I could assume that the mere act of writing it will change people's minds, break them away from the apathy and frustration that seem to engulf us all. I don't assume that; and although I have no quick answers, I hope to work toward finding them when I leave here.

I am also optimistic enough to believe that despite the recession, the inflation, the turpitude in government, the desire of many of us to see justice done will lead us to learn how to cope with the real world, how to reach and reach out with our humanity. I can only hope it happens soon.