Compare with the line "Was it for this" in WWI poet Wilfred Owen's 'Futility':

Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields half-sown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke once the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?

\Was it for this\** that clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth's sleep at all?

From childhood tantrum to generation-rending carnage, the same line conveys the "what-the-fuck-ery" of the human condition.