Becoming A Traitor

BEING A TRAITOR is both difficult and easy. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson all spent most of their lives as loyal British subjects, and when it appeared increasingly likely that the Americans would decide to separate form their own country, they each agonized over the decision of whether to remain loyal to their country - or to become traitors and revolutionaries. We Americans are not taught in school that our founding fathers were traitors, but of course that is exactly what they were, from any conceivable point of view, even their own. They made their choice only with the greatest reluctance, only when they felt they had no other option, and they agonized over what they had done. Between 1776 and 1781 one hundred to two hundred thousand Americans got on board ships and left the colonies, for places like Canada, England,and the Caribbean islands, so disgusted were they with the revolution and their traitorous fellow colonists. Of the remaining, about half were in favor of the revolution, the "patriots", and about half remained loyal to Great Britain, the "loyalitsts", and the two groups hated each other, did not get along, and the instancees of small scale violence between them are too numerous to have ever been fully documented in history books, lost in the mists of time, fist fights, duels, and so forth. Benjamin Franklin's son Robert, the governor of New Jersey, emigrated to England, and he and his father never spoke nor saw each other again. Benjamin died at odds with his son. Less than a hundred years later, the choice between becoming traitors or remaining loyal to an intolerable government was once again forced upon many Americans, and many chose the former, leaving and forming the Confederate States of America, and instigating the second American revolutionary war, loyalists versus traitors. Traitors seldom if ever think of themselves as traitors, certainly the Confederates didn't, and most Amerian to this day still do not. But what else could they be called? Traitors normally consider themselves crusaders for a higher cause, forced into the role. Robert E. lee was a patriot to his state of Virginia, in his own mind, in an age when people were usually much more loyal to their states than to the nation as a whole. Today it is common to consider the American civil War a tragic but titanic struggle between two moral equals; hence the plethora of statues commemorating people like Rovert E. lee which are only now beginning to come down, as we begin to recognize the confederacy as having fought for ignoble causes, namely slavery and white supremacy. We remain reluctant, however, to call them 'traitors", strangely reluctant, since they were indeed traitors to the United States, but reluctant because we have to deal with the former confederate states every day; hence, our reluctance. History, American history hath shown that traitors often come in large numbers, they cluster together in groups organized around a guiding principle, like secession. The traitors in our midst now are Trump and his deplorable supporters, as many as seventy million strong, who still claim without evidence that the presidency was stolen from Trump, and who were willing to attack and destroy the nation's capitol to prove it. What could be more traitorous than refusing to accept the results of a free and fair election in a democracy merely because you found the outcome unsafisfactory? They remain traitors becaue they have not changed their opinion; most of them still think the election was stolen, most of them still believe that the January 6 insurrection was a good try. Its enough to almost make good loyal Americans want to see them off onto planes and ships, headed for distant shores.