In 1993, in the movie "Groundhog Day," Bill Murray starred as a weatherman visiting Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to cover the annual Groundhog Day celebration, gets stuck in a time warp and is forced to relive the same day over and over again. Similar to the time warp we have all lived through for the past 15 months. But just like in the movie, we all wake up and things are back on track as the world starts revolving again. Or, so we would think, anyway.
A glance over the news of the last couple of weeks feels like being stuck in a time loop. A man threatens to shoot people at a Texas Wal-Mart. Three men open fire at a club during a concert in Florida. A firefighter kills his coworkers in California. A man kills his co-workers at a transit facility in California. A Mother's Day/Birthday Party in Colorado ends in a mass shooting. A man forces a plane to land after trying to take over the cockpit. A threat at a high school causes a lockdown. A Minnesota police officer killed a black man. Protests broke out. A man took a gun into a public place and killed eight people. Newly released video footage showed that a Chicago police officer had shot and killed an unarmed child. Health officials in Colorado warned of a new potential surge in Covid-19 infections as the state reopened and mask mandates dropped. A child is shot and killed in a road rage incident. Experts look into evidence of UFOs. Emails reveal the virus may actually have been created in a lab. Polls show that many Republicans are hesitant about getting vaccinated. Donald Trump is looking at running for office. People are still dying from Covid-19. A solemn anniversary marks 100 years of a problem that still persists.
And just hours before I write this, I read that a higher court has ruled California's ban on assault weapons as a violation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. I do not think that was the idea the Founders had in mind when they wrote that amendment.
Though each of these stories felt dismally and predictably repetitive, the stories themselves are new, bearing fresh violence, fresh tragedy, and fresh grief. In many ways, individual cases of state brutality, public protest, gun violence, coronavirus infections, and political misuse of a public health emergency are part of the same old story: at the same time, they are each singularly meaningful.
The repetition reflects broken systems and ongoing crises: the stories are unique. And the press is responsible for placing individual stories in context even while allowing each story its own particular relevance.
News outlets continue to grapple with the challenge of connecting the dots between incidents that are unique but not isolated. The New York Times reported recently that police officers have been responsible for the deaths of more than three people per day since the first day of Derek Chauvin’s trial for the murder of George Floyd. In another story,Times reported how a Chicago police officer killing seventh-grader Adam Toledo has brought back memories of Chicago police killing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014 (in both cases, city officials attempted to obscure video evidence).
The Washington Post reported that “the coronavirus pandemic in the United States has turned into a patchwork of regional hotspots, with some states hammered by a surge of infections and hospitalizations even as others have seen the crisis begin to ease.”
A Times investigation found that counties that had voted for Donald Trump in November’s election had lower vaccination rates, on average. Also recently, CNN published a map noting the 45 mass shootings that had taken place within the previous month. More shootings were reported within two days of the release of that map. On a recent Sunday morning, a gunman in a Wisconsin tavern killed three people and injured two more; later that day, another gunman killed three people in Austin, Texas.
“Another day, another mass shooting,” a writer wrote on March 22 after a gunman in Colorado killed 10 people in a grocery store. “The repetition of these horrors is, in a sense, just as much the point as their individuality.” And here we are again. Another day, another mass shooting, another act of police brutality, another community facing illness, another poll showing the fallout of misinformation and exploitative politics, another sister, aunt, grandfather, bus driver, colleague, or friend lost to COVID-19.
New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb was in Minneapolis reporting on Derek Chauvin’s trial a few weeks ago when Minnesota police shot and killed Daunte Wright, another black man. “The connections between their stories had already been secured in the public’s mind,” Cobb wrote for New Yorker, calling Floyd's and Wright's deaths, “installments in a serial American tragedy that no one wishes to see but is set to be replayed for the foreseeable future.” Shortly after that, Cobb was on a Columbia Journalism Review podcast, the Kicker, describing a moment in which he listened as George Floyd’s brother Philonise considered what he might say to Daunte Wright’s mother. “This man who lost his brother was sorting out how to console this woman who lost her son, and really trying to give her the lay of the land about how this would all play out in the public eye and so on,” Cobb told the editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, “That is never an expertise that anyone should have.” The two stories have been cemented together in a national conversation by the thru line of police brutality, but each family is experiencing a grief and loss all their own.
“The routine has become so predictable that some gun-control activists see the familiarity of tragedy as their biggest obstacle to achieving the change they have been seeking for the past decade,” Washington Post reporters wrote recently of the repetitive prevalence of gun violence. That is the trouble for the press, too: the familiarity of tragedy: the tragedy of police brutality, gun violence, deaths from COVID-19.
But tragedy is never so familiar as when it strikes you. Telling human stories takes special attention and time. But - as much as the context - it is the specific humanity within each instance of crisis that must be foregrounded again and again and again and again, lest we lose sight of each loss in the overwhelming tumult of the crisis.
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