That simplistic dismissal of complicated problems is what the Bush Administration encourages us to keep doing with its "Read my lips" domestic agenda and "Just Cause' foreign policy. That oversimplification and abdication of thought is what television satirist Dana Carvey captured when he parodied how President Bush sought to seek credit for the revolution in eastern Europe last winter.

"Before Bush--Wall," the comedian deadpanned, imitating the President's clipped speech, "After Bush--no Wall."

SO WHAT is the alternative? Should we strive for a new Great Society, or just give up?

Sooner or later, we have to start by leaving the party of self-congratulation behind, and to stop taking seriously the co-opted, grinning 60s smiley-face that proclaims, "Don't Worry, Be Happy." When we do that, we can confront the real America in the face. Did you know that the number of Americans living below the poverty level (earning less than $6000 a year) rose more than 20 percent in the decade leading to 1988, to 32 million?

That between 31 million and 37 million Americans have no health insurance? That the crisis for minorities in our forgotten inner cities is reaching the boiling point, even beyond drugs, gangs, crime and disease? That 35 percent of Black children and 45 percent of Latino children never graduate from high school?

The paradox is that the 1990s pose a challenge our predecessors would have eagerly embraced. We graduate into a world that sees no war on the horizon, is buoyed by a long economic expansion and is equipped with the resources to bring about basic social and political change. We are the beneficiaries of a victory in an ideological war we did not have to physically fight, confronting a time of profound--but peaceful--competition internationally and in our own troubled society.

It's okay to worry a little.

Spencer S. Hsu '90, an English and American Literature concentrator, was executive editor of The Crimson in 1989.