Joseph Sabino Mistick: Our real Groundhog Day, an endless loop of tragedy

Another Groundhog Day has come and gone. It was started by German immigrants in Pennsylvania in 1887 in Punxsutawney. Historians say it is based on a pre-Christian ritual that used the behavior of small animals to predict the weather, back when believing that you could predict the start of spring was critical in farming communities.

Thirty years ago, Groundhog Day got a real boost with the release of the film of that same name, a light movie with a serious message. Bill Murray stars as Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors, who is assigned to cover the observance in Punxsutawney. Connors hates the assignment and can’t wait to get out of there.

But he awakens every day to find that it is Groundhog Day again and that he is stuck in Punxsutawney — over and over. It becomes his private hell. Because of the movie’s message, Groundhog Day is now a reminder that in the real world, people can get trapped in an endless loop of events from which they cannot escape.

Americans wake up almost every day to what seems to be a constant flow of news about brazen street murders, mass shootings, sheer terror. Mass shootings — at schools, malls, social gatherings, churches and just about everywhere — are so frequent that we lose track of which was the latest or which was the worst.

The official responses are familiar and always seem the same: calls to ban military-style weapons and high-capacity clips, calls for faster and better background checks, calls for increased mental health funding. But nothing ever changes, and when the shooting begins again, the cycle starts all over.

The horror of all this is reinforced when we see the actual murders of George Floyd and Tyre Nichols, videotaped and aired on the internet and on our televisions. It is all part of this nightmare of violence.

When George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who knelt on his neck and glared at bystanders as they videotaped him, we all hoped to never relive that day.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — which includes de-escalation training and a duty-­to-intervene provision — was introduced in Congress, but it has gone nowhere.

When Tyre Nichols was savagely beaten to death after a traffic stop in Memphis, the beating was captured on police body cameras and aired on the nightly news. Again, there were calls for reform, but every day is the same.

In an article published this Groundhog Day, David G. Allan, editorial director of CNN Features, says that some religious scholars see Buddhist and Christian themes running through “Groundhog Day.”

Bill Murray’s character “perfects the day with creative self-improvement tasks and compassionately helping others. Once he becomes the best possible version of Phil Connors, he is released from his temporal prison … .”

Other experts think the movie may be about “the Catholic concept of purgatory, a spiritual realm where souls must linger until they expiate their remaining sins and earn their way into heaven.”

Maybe those experts who believe we could be trapped in an endless loop of our worst nightmare are right. On the other hand, the faith that we have in our democratic form of government requires us to believe we can fix these problems together.