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Lori Falce: Groundhog Day all over again

Lori Falce
| Thursday, January 30, 2020 4:31 p.m.
Louis Goldman
Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliott star in the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day.”

Groundhog Day isn’t here until Sunday but I feel like I’ve been living it for months.

Remember the Bill Murray movie where Groundhog Day never ended? Where no matter what happened when he got up in the morning, no matter how he screwed things up or fixed what went wrong, at the end of the night, the day reset itself and he was right back where he started?

That’s it. That’s the feeling. That right there. You feel it, too, don’t you?

Because we are all trapped in a news cycle that feels more like a spin cycle, whirling us around and around until we are dizzy and ending up right back where we started.

It was bad enough when it was just an endless parade of Democratic presidential primary developments. A year of more and more and yet more people stepping up to be the hope of the party.

Then the debates. And polls. And debates about polls. And polls to get into the debates.

But it isn’t just the looming primaries and caucuses and conventions and election. Our other major news seems like reruns, too.

Brexit is being planned, voted, voted down, delayed, planned again, voted again, until the European Parliament’s vote this week to officially rubber-stamp the United Kingdom’s secession slid past many who lost track of exactly what was happening across the pond.

The grand-daddy of stories that we wake up to anew each and every day, of course, is impeachment. For months, there was the question of whether it would happen. Then there was whether the House of Representatives would actually pull off charges for the third time in history. Now it is the trial.

We have spent so much time pulled back and forth between the White House and Ukraine, the Trump administration and the Democratic leadership and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

It is the topic every elected official wants to talk about when it suits their purposes and avoid when it doesn’t. It cannot be escaped on social media. It hangs in the air like old cigarette smoke.

Just like Murray started to see his never-ending Groundhog Day as normal, it’s easy to forget that there was ever a time that wasn’t dominated by the march to the 2020 election and all of its players, Democrat and Republican alike.

But my greatest fear is that there is just no getting off this treadmill.

I worry that we can’t get back to a place where anything real can be accomplished because, just when it seems like we can do something about infrastructure or health care or the opioid epidemic, we will get sucked back into replaying this year’s race the same way so much of 2016 dominates today’s issues.

And if that seems familiar, it’s probably because we have been reliving these days for so long, with only the aggrieved parties changing sides. “We survived Obama. You’ll survive Trump” is a rehash of the same refrain about Bush and Obama.

Regardless of how impeachment or the election ends, I want to move on to news about getting stuff done. I think we can do it. I know we can if we try.

But somehow I’m resigned to more Groundhog Day-ja vu.


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