Charles Roll's bio: specs for bio, per OpEdNews: "your work, your passions, your family, your activism, your hobbies, your favorites, your age, marital status, beliefs, books you've written, accomplishments in your life, favorite quotations ... reason to be connected to OpEdNews" My work has been varied. A cog in a factory, man imitating machine, lifting and stacking every ten seconds, for 8 hours and 10 hours night after night. Army, not much as a soldier. That was during the UMT&S Act, so I enlisted rather than be drafted. I wanted to go with dignity. That's my story, anyway. I love music. Making music, it's like sex, I can find the flow experience there, lose the self entirely. Poetry too. But I don't 'write' modern poetry, preferring lyrical stuff. Ezra Pound said that music that departs too far from dance loses it, and poetry that departs too far from song loses it too. Or words to that effect. My family. My origins. Born in Greater Oklahoma, at the bottom of the Great Depression, son of impoverished pioneer stock (aka 'rednecks') mixed with migrants from Ireland, who came on British passports during the 1920s. I have been arrested, as were so many others, at the Atomic Test Site in Nevada. My defense was that I had been invited by the actual people of the land, the Western Shoshone, and by the great Corbin Harney, author of 'The Way It Is: One Water, One Air, One Mother Earth'. My hobby, it seems, is being here at OpEdNews in an effort to understand the world in a social context. My beliefs? There's somebody posting here at OpEdNews, a Cassidy by name, who lives on the Old Sod of the Emerald Isle ... who practices what he terms the Lotus Cross Devotion. I'll go with that. Politically, I am of the Democracy delusional system. Books I've published? No. Accomplishments? Nothing notable. Favorite quotations. One of them is from the shortest of the gosho of Nichiren Daishonin, 'Great Evil and Great Good' - "Great events never have minor omens. When great evil occurs, great good follows." From Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism Library at http://www.nichirenlibrary.org/en/wnd-1/Content/168