Forsaking Utopia

Note: This is a draft from April 2013 which I decided to publish 

This semester has presented me with an alarming, and hitherto unsuspected dilemma.
I'm not going to be a college kid forever.
(shocked silence)
Realizing that my time here is ending, and that something else will need to begin, has been a thought provoking, exciting, and sometimes terrifying theme of the past few months.
I'm trying to understand what exactly I've gained and lost in the past four years, what of enduring value I've learned, who I've become that I wasn't before. Also, I'm struggling to understand where I should go from here, what I'm equipped, and called upon, to go out and do in the world.
It's complicated. Truly.
But, maybe because I thrive on philosophical grey regions, or maybe because I'm the product of a bewildering post-modern society and educational system, I find that my answers to many of these important questions are hazed with doubts, and rich in paradox.
We live in a funny, cruel, dazzlingly eccentric world. I'm endlessly startled and fascinated by it, and the past four years have been an agonizing and glorious indulgence of this fascination. Yet the more I study, the more I feel the sameness, the repetition of human experience in the past, and what surrounds us in the present. We've been doing the same things over and over by different names. And this has been true as much of 'Christianity' (speaking of the institution, and not of historical individuals) as much as of any other group or ideology in society. What troubles me, is that in every instance I see, both among Christians and non-Christians, the people who were wrong have been loudest and most determined- and often, not only dominated, but won the debate. For every Francis of Assissi who passionately opposed the Crusades, there were a thousand 'true believers' to instigate and passionately defend them. Humanity, as a mass, is consistently blind to its own blunders. And in every case, our stated intentions are magnificent.
The frightening thing about evil, is its insistence upon defending itself, upon being cloaked in noble aims and acceptable language. Crusaders didn't butcher, rape and rob Jews and Muslims, they liberated the Holy Land. The Inquisition didn't terrorize, dehumanize, despoil, and torture Spanish citizens, it purified and protected true Catholicism. The Reign of Terror didn't turn a civilian population into a bloodthirsty animal mob, it redressed grievances and protected the fragile liberty of the French common man. Hitler didn't murder the weak and defenceless, he purified his nation of unwanted and hostile elements, striving to give her the prosperity and glory she deserved. Americans and Brits didn't violate human rights by firebombing civilian populations during the second World War, killing thousands of defenceless women and children for the purpose of terrorizing and demoralizing the enemy- we defended liberty and democracy, took out the bad guys, whatever the cost. [Little matter that among the 'costs' were the lives of hundreds of thousands Japanese and German civilians, and providing Stalin with the resources which he turned against his own people and Eastern Europe during years of far more horrific bloodshed and oppression.] Slavery, colonialism, oppression of women... how do we step out of our own cultures, assumptions, and time period to see things as they are? Why have so few even attempted it in the past? How can I know that my very obsession with culture and time, and the blinders they place on our worldview is not in itself a subjective assumption instilled by my culture, and region, and the period I've lived in?
(crickets)
Yet this is clear: whenever mankind behaves wickedly, he attempts to justify himself. And when we behave wickedly as a group, or as a nation, we're all the more foolish, all the more easily satisfied with moral platitudes and evasions, all the more vociferous in our own defence... and all the more deadly. It frightens me, because it's happening at every level of society every day, here, and I don't trust myself to see it clearly. It frightens me, because I frequently feel that I'm alone in my understanding of what's right and wrong. It frightens me because, surrounded by so many fine, opinionated, vociferous people, whom I passionately disagree with, I have less and less faith in my chances of arriving at the correct answers. Also, because I don't clearly understand yet what the proper, loving, Christ-honoring response to these situations is, what conscience may demand of me. But that's a question for another day, and for a different jumble of run-on sentences.
I realize that I don't have anything particularly original or brilliant to say about any of this. If you're bored by this repetition of tiresome and threadbare questions, and my clumsy struggles to address them, I can only apologize, and encourage you to go read something more helpful. I'm not a philosopher, and I can't claim any particular wisdom or enlightenment. I'm simply interested, and concerned, and trying to understand. I want a response to Schaeffer's question 'How should we then live?', and I don't fully trust the accuracy of any of the teachers and theologians who, over the years, have attempted to answer it.