That's Just The Way It Is

 

"That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change."

Bruce Hornsby’s mournful refrain echoes not only across radio waves, but across the centuries, carried like a burdened hymn in the marrow of Black existence in America. His voice, distant yet urgent, becomes the ambient grief score for a nation trapped in its own unyielding time loop...a cruel remix of bondage, bullets, breathlessness, and broken promises.

"Two Distant Strangers," the 2020 Oscar-winning short film by Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe, doesn’t merely revisit this loop. It etches it into our consciousness like a brand, reminding us that to be Black in America is to wake up again and again into a nightmare from which there is no escape.

The film opens in a city known for dreams and detours...New York. A Black man, Carter James, wakes in the warm afterglow of a promising date. He wants nothing more than to get home to his dog, Jeter...named after the Yankees legend, a symbol of loyalty and innocence. But in America, even that modest dream is dangerous when worn in Black skin. On the street, Carter meets a white NYPD officer named Merk who (like too many before him) suspects, harasses, and ultimately executes. Then Carter wakes again. And again. And again. Each time, he is murdered. Sometimes on the street. Sometimes in his lover’s apartment. Sometimes at the threshold of peace. No matter what he does differently, no matter how polite, how logical, how deferential...he dies. And wakes again.

Carter’s time loop becomes a metaphor for the cyclical horror of systemic racism. The America that was built on stolen lives still feeds on their echoes. The generational trauma that shackled African bodies in slave ships has merely changed its uniform...from overseer’s whip to officer’s badge. What Carter experiences in a single narrative arc is what Black Americans have endured for centuries: the illusion of progress, interrupted by a bullet.

Unlike "Groundhog Day" where the protagonist uses his recursive fate to learn jazz piano, sculpt ice, and become a better man...Carter’s loop leads not to self-betterment but to existential exhaustion. Phil Connors woke each morning to Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” a kitschy anthem of romantic renewal. Carter wakes to Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” ... a dirge of reluctant resignation, a song that reminds us of what society tells Black people daily: that no matter how many marches, how many bills signed into law, how many names chanted into the wind... “That’s just the way it is.”

And yet, Carter tries. After nearly a hundred deaths, he appeals to Merk not as an enemy but as a man. He explains the loop, predicts its beats like déjà vu scripture, and asks for help. For one brief breath of narrative, it seems salvation might be real. Merk drives him home. They shake hands. Hope blooms. But like so many peace treaties signed on American soil, it’s a ruse. As Carter turns to his door, Merk smirks, applauds the “noble performance,” and shoots him in the back. Blood flows and pools across the concrete in the unmistakable shape of Africa...mother of us all, now the outline of a grave. “See you tomorrow, kid.”

The poetry in this is almost unbearable. A man’s last breath forming the continent of his origin, of his ancestors...those kidnapped, shackled, and sold...whose agony, passed down in DNA and memory, now manifests as modern-day murder under the guise of policing. That is the spiritual burden of the African in America: to carry not only your life, but the accumulated weight of four hundred years of injustice, cruelty, and contradiction. This is the loop we’ve been trying to escape since 1619.

In one haunting moment of the film, Carter, weary and desperate, insists: “One way or another, I’m getting home to my freakin’ dog.” That single sentence, raw and human, is a declaration of war against despair. “Home” in this context is not just his apartment...it’s freedom. Safety. Sanctuary. Maybe even a place beyond this world, where ancestors sing you into wholeness. Where your skin is not criminalized. Where you can sleep and rise without fearing the boot or the bullet.

Bruce Hornsby’s song, originally released in 1986, still sounds like prophecy. His verses chronicle long welfare lines, segregation defended by men in cheap suits, and the empty optimism that accompanied the Economic Opportunity Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The message? Yes, we got a little more...but not enough. Not nearly.

Hornsby’s brother John once said the song is about “compassion, about understanding racial and social types, and beliefs and practices that are different from your own.” But America, so bound to its illusions of innocence, has always failed that test.

And we have the receipts. Each name a psalm, a dirge, a testament:

• Eric Garner, choked to death after breaking up a fight.
• Michelle Cusseaux, shot while changing her door lock.
• Tanisha Anderson, lost in a mental health crisis.
• Tamir Rice, only 12, playing in a park.
• Natasha McKenna, battling schizophrenia, tased to death.
• Walter Scott, gunned down near an auto parts store.
• Bettie Jones, killed while answering the door.
• Philando Castile, pulled over after dinner with his girlfriend.
• Botham Jean, murdered while eating ice cream in his living room.
• Atatiana Jefferson, babysitting her nephew, gunned down.
• Eric Reason, simply parking his car.
• Rayshard Brooks, asleep in his car.
• Ezell Ford, walking in his own neighborhood.
• Elijah McClain, apologizing while dying.
• Trayvon Martin, carrying Skittles and iced tea.
• Dominique Clayton, executed while she slept.
• Breonna Taylor, shot in her bed during a no-knock raid.
• George Floyd, suffocated on the street over twenty dollars.

All unarmed. All innocent. All trying to do ordinary things in a country that makes their very existence a threat.

If “The Way It Is” reflects the bitter truth, then “Two Distant Strangers” is the cinematic blues riff that plays beneath it. These stories, these names, this trauma...it is not fiction, not anomaly, but ritual. A national religion built on Black sacrifice and white impunity. And so the loop continues, even as the world watches.

But still, we remember. We name the dead. We light candles. We raise our fists. We march, write, weep, vote, teach, pray. Because we must. Because despite everything, there is an ancestral memory that still believes in home (not just Carter’s home, or his dog, or his date) but the collective home of justice, of dignity, of peace.

And though “that’s just the way it is,” we echo back...fierce and unflinching:

"But don’t you believe them."