Shock is an appropriate reaction when the US President reacts to a national tragedy not with calls for support and comfort for those who have lost loved ones, not with soothing words for the millions of Americans who travel by air every year and who fear meeting a similar fate, and not with reassurances that experts will figure out what went wrong that allowed a collision between a commercial airplane and a military helicopter and then enact policies to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Instead, President Trump held a press conference to blame the accident on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies at the Federal Aviation Administration. When asked how he could possibly know that was the cause of Thursday night’s failure to prevent a mid-air collision, President Trump replied it because he had “common sense.”

What he didn’t have was facts.

Yesterday, Philip Bump, The Washington Post’s reporter who specializes in looking into the data behind the daily news stories, published this chart comparing the characteristics of Air Traffic Controllers in President Trump’s first term to those in President Biden’s last year:

This clearly shows that the agency became even more male under President Biden (by .5 percentage points), a little less white (by 3.5 percentage points), and had slightly more employees reporting disabilities (by 1.3 percentage points).

This is hardly a picture of DEI gone crazy. The truth is, 7 out of 10 Air Traffic Controllers are White Men.

Philip Bump got this information the day after the crash. The President could have found out these facts; he just needed to bother asking. Instead, he used this tragedy to push his attacks on US civil servants for being “rogue agents,” incompetent people who the left-wing/Democrats have installed to push their “Marxist” agenda against “real” hard-working Americans.

Full disclosure: I know I take this personally. I grew up in DC, and for many years, my father worked for this dreaded “Deep State” bureaucracy. So did most of the parents of my friends and classmates. And while of course, some people are not the best, just as in any organization, I know our civil servants don’t deserve this demonization. Mostly, they are hard-working and underpaid personnel who DON’T want to be involved in politics. They just want to do their jobs and lead with their professional experience and expertise rather than follow any political agenda, Republican or Democrat.

So I have to speak out against President Trump attacks on our civil servants based on nothing but his political agenda. They are not some evil cabal trying to run things behind the scenes. They are medical professionals trying to convince people not to inject themselves with bleach when the President of the United States suggests that as a means to kill the coronavirus. They are educators trying to reduce the great disparity in educational achievement between the races. They are federal park rangers trying to warn park visitors against trying to take selfies with dangerous wild animals. They are people who run programs to feed the hungry, house the homeless, help our farmers produce bigger and better crops, reduce the violence in our country, and stop wars across the world. They are the postal workers who continue to deliver our mail even on the snow days when we stay home in our cozy houses.

My suggestion is not to buy into President Trump’s ugly and baseless attacks on our federal workers. Most are doing their best to keep us safe and to make our country better. I still have many friends in DC, and it is a scary and demoralizing time for our civil servants. So if you have a chance, let them know that we appreciate their work, even if our President does not.

Sometimes, Activism can just be saying, “Thank You for what you do.”