On a September afternoon in Washington, thousands of people encircled the Kennedy Center with linked arms, placing their bodies between an iconic institution and what they feared was its planned demolition. The closure of the nation's premier performing arts venue had been announced by the Trump administration, and the silence that followed filled quickly with photographs, reports, and dread. What unfolded was not simply a protest but a reckoning — a public argument about what a government chooses to preserve, and what the erasure of culture says about a nation's sense of itself.