Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow — security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.
–Sean O’Casey
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I had the movie Young Cassidy on in the studio yesterday which is a mid-1960’s biopic starring Rod Taylor as the great Irish playwright Sean O’Casey. It documents the formative years up to the time when he finally had his first plays produced at the Abbey Theatre , the first being in 1923 when he was 43 years old. It ends with the production of his play, The Plough and the Stars , which caused riots at the time and propelled him into a career as a full-time playwright. He had worked as a laborer for the many years before this breakthrough and as a result his work often dealt with the inequality of the classes and other societal ills.
I can’t say that it was a great movie but it was pretty good, good enough that it made me think. Think about O’Casey’s work and how it was shaped by his early life, living in poverty and oppression. Think about how such inequalities still rule our world and how we so willingly live with them so long as it doesn’t affect our own little worlds, so long as we don’t have to think about them.
Makes me glad there were men like O’Casey to inflame thought and passion with their work, because to make us think is to put us on the road to action. It seems that such thought is a rare commodity today even with the billions of words that spring forward every day on the web, on blogs like this, on Twitter, on text messages and on and on. We talk and talk, blathering on and on (this is a prime example!) but are these words adding anything to the greater good? How many of these words make us stop and think or inspire us to action? Or is action lost in the deluge of words?
Could we even hear the words of an O’Casey today in the din of all these meaningless words?
Redtree Times 