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Jay Roberts Tuesday evening I spoke with one of my brothers, Jason, who, like me, is running a startup (check it out, www.preezo.com, a cool PowerPoint webapp). Riffing off some of my thoughts in the Ron Paul Nation article, the response to which reinforced the thesis with me, I wanted to discuss some software & application concepts with him. So first, I directed Jason to the article and asked him to call me back after reading it – I pointedly gave him no clue what it was about. Ten minutes later, he called me in a lather. "Ron Paul, I didn't know you supported him, he's the man, the only hope we have, I'm all over that," was Jason's response, in addition to agreeing with the nuts and bolts of emerging cooperative structures on the net. He went on to add that another one of our brothers, Jeff, who is flying Blackhawks in Afghanistan, is also a Ron Paul "nut" and reports that Ron Paul is wildly popular among the frontline troops there. Incidentally, Jason was very impressed that his big brother had been published on lewrockwell.com, he's a regular reader. While this was gratifying, it didn't surprise me as much as an exchange I had with one of my sisters several months ago. First, one must understand that Natalie, an internal medicine doctor, has been a lifelong liberal of the utopian sort. Militant feminist, hardline pro-abortion, environmentalist, and unashamedly adamant in her views. We have never agreed on anything political except that we think each other to be complete idiots. Very early in the summer, Natalie and I were catching up in a phone call, and the talk turned to the war, the neocons, the terrible state of affairs in the U.S., and for the first time in our lives, we found ourselves largely agreeing on issues. So I decided to go out on a limb – giving Natalie advice is always a risky affair – and just casually mentioned, well, there's this guy, Ron Paul, you might want to check out. Natalie immediately responds, in her characteristic brook no opposition tone, "Ron Paul should be our next President." To say that I was floored would be an understatement, since Natalie traditionally has had the view that Republicans should all be sent to camps somewhere. She then started going on about how she's been gaining an understanding of that pesky 2nd Amendment that I’ve always been raving about, has been going back and rereading some of the principles of the founding fathers thoughts about limited government and the danger of a powerful central government and so forth. Again, I haven't been so stunned since I was hit by lightning while riding my motorcycle in 1980 (but that is another story). So the tally among the Roberts siblings is 4 of us have independently became Ron Paul supporters early and often. There are two more, sister Celeste and brother James, who, although he goes by his middle name of Steve, gives us a set of brothers named Jay, James, Jason & Jeffrey. So, to summarize the Roberts clan that is known to support RP, and, furthermore, have never been particularly politically active:
That leaves:
I'm going to check with Celeste and Steve, and it wouldn't surprise me now to find at least one if not both of the two are RP supporters. But if even not, that is still 4–2 among this determinedly mainstream Roberts slice of the middle class. There is indeed hope for America! October 5, 2007 Jay Roberts [send him mail] is CTO of Cellblock.com. His wife and 3-year-old son kindly let him out regularly to play guitar with his jazz buddies. Copyright © 2007 LewRockwell.com |
