In Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood, thousands of people joined hands around the Kennedy Center — a marble institution that has stood as both a cultural anchor and a living memorial for over half a century — to answer what many heard as a conditional threat from President Trump: recognition, or demolition. The gesture was ancient in its logic, a human perimeter drawn between a shared inheritance and the will of a single office. At stake is not only a building's fate, but the older question of who holds authority over the symbols a society keeps to remember itself.