To This We've Come - Phillip Vo

“The passion for inflicting harm, the cruel thirst for vengeance, an unpacific and relentless spirit, the fever of revolt, the lust of power, and such like things, all these are rightly condemned in war."

“To this we’ve come; that man be born a stranger on God’s earth.”

It seemed fitting for me to throw in my two cents on a topic such as this one. 

War is an ugly thing. Death and suffering are ugly things. Power and control, as well the thirst that men have for it is an ugly thing. 

I recently had the opportunity of attending UM”s presentation of an opera entitled, “The Consul”, which displayed the story of a woman and her husband after a war in their totalitarian country. It deeply moved me, and one of the constant themes throughout was the idea that we as men have created borders, lines that divide, boundaries that separate us. The woman and her husband desperately want to escape the country, they approach their country’s consulate in attempts to legal enter another country but are repeatedly denied. Eventually, the husband must flee because of the secret police, and the woman kills herself as her child has died of hunger and her husband is sure to be dead. 

There is an Aria at the end of the second act entitled, “To this we’ve come… papers, papers, papers.” It is sang while Mrs. Sorel (The Woman) is throwing all of the papers in the consulate while making a statement about humanity: that we have divided ourselves with imaginary lines and borders because of ideology and belief, power and control, and would very well ignore suffering in order to preserve these beliefs. 

At the end of the day, we are all human. It is our ideas that separate us.

I believe fully that some ideas are worth fighting for. Some ideas are worth fighting against. 

But only the truth is worth dying for.

As some have thirsted for power and sought control and dominion over other men, so it has been that others rose to fight against evil in pursuit of the preservation of truth and freedom. There are hundreds of moral questions to be asked, as well as hundreds of moral situations to be presented when it comes to war. 

Here is a question: what idea is worth killing another human being over?

Commented on Kayla's and Cade's