LOFTUS: Ghoulish Blame Games Are Warping Our Sense Of Tragedy

“We’re landing in 20 minutes.”

For most of us, these are banal words. A quickly typed text punched in with your thumbs, with a plane emoji dropped in. Beamed out to your spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, mom, dad, and the college friend who’s picking you up from the airport the moment your phone’s service returns from a high-altitude dead zone. The last thing you would expect to be the last thing you ever do. (Subscribe to MR. RIGHT, a weekly newsletter about modern masculinity)

But, for one man, these are words that will forever haunt him in the quiet darkness of his memory.

“She said, ‘We’re landing in 20 minutes,’” Hamaad Raza told a local Washington, D.C., news outlet.

Raza was speaking of his wife, Asra Hussain, and her final words before she died in the horrific air collision Wednesday night at Ronald Reagan National Airport. Along with Hussain, 64 other passengers on American Airlines Flight 5342 and three U.S. soldiers aboard an Army Black Hawk perished in the tragedy.

“I was waiting and I started seeing a bunch of EMS vehicles speeding past me, like way too many than normal, and two, my texts weren’t going through,” Raza recalled. “You see these things happen in the news, you see them happen in other countries. And then, I show up to the airport, and my wife’s not responding, and I look on Twitter and I see that it’s her flight.”

Sadly, Raza’s story and his pain, and the stories and pain of so many others who lost loved ones Wednesday, appear to have been buried underneath the muck of social media. All the ghoulish blame games played by its users thirsting for engagement.

Liberals, such as CNN’s Bakari Sellers, pointed the finger at President Donald Trump. Trump, in turn, pointed the finger at Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies within federal agencies. Other conservatives blamed DEI, as well.

Planes colliding in midair demonstrates the spectacular catastrophe that is DEI. It is going to take years, maybe even decades to deal with the negative consequences of the DEI wrecking ball.
What is less visible and less sensational but no less damaging is what DEI is doing to… https://t.co/6vSiEU8NBC

— Ayaan Hirsi Ali (@Ayaan) January 31, 2025

There may well be someone, or some system, some acronym like DEI, to blame in the end, once the facts are less hazy. But one thing is abundantly clear: social media has warped our sense of tragedy.

I deleted the post because timing matters. Politics at this point does not. I fucked up, I own that. I am very prayerful but I’m also very frustrated upset and disturbed with where we are as a country. I recognize, and I will do better.

The only thing that matters is rescuing…

— Bakari Sellers (@Bakari_Sellers) January 30, 2025

Instead of feeling profound sadness at the loss of human life, we resort to callous, knee-jerk reactions. Everything gets turned into a political meme. It’s Trump’s fault, Trump is to blame because of his hiring freeze for federal employees, and air traffic controllers were short-staffed. No, it’s Biden’s fault. Biden supported DEI, and DEI policies allowed these incompetent people to work in jobs that demand the utmost level of competence. 

Social media rewards these reactions. It feeds on the scapegoating, and if your scapegoat fits neatly into a potent narrative — i.e., Trump is destroying this country; DEI is destroying this country — if you color your take with black and white villains and heroes to explain a random and chaotic world, then you have a better shot at going viral. It’s like we all want to go viral at the expense of our humanity. We all want to degrade what makes us human and different from technology to win on the digital platforms technology has created.

Social media numbs us, ultimately. Sitting behind a screen, you lose touch with life beyond the digital world. Your empathy drains away with each passing minute you spend online, engaging in politicized sludge. You see a pixelated video of two aircraft blowing up mid-air and see only that: two aircraft blowing up mid-air, debris falling into a black river. You can’t feel the rush of heat from the explosion. You can’t know their final moments, the faces they made at impact. You can’t feel the pain of their loved ones who never got a text back.

You can try to, though, if you can resist the temptation of political blame games.

An NBC4 Washington reporter asked Raza if he had any words for people supporting him and other families amid their grief.

He said, “Life is short. Hug your loved ones. Tell them you love them when they’re getting on a flight. Check up on them. Text your family when you land.”