Anniversaries try to make meaning behave. This one won’t. The footage still runs: doors breached, glass broken, officers pressed against marble, a gallows hauled into the daylight like a dare. The accounting since then has been steady and uneven—charges filed, sentences handed down, excuses rehearsed, money raised off the wreckage as if chaos were a product line.

What changed is not the tape but the tolerance. Threats became a grammar. Local boards hired security. Election workers asked for escorts. Campaign ads practiced with crosshairs and cutaways. People learned to hear “civil war” as metaphor until it wasn’t.

Here, the day passes without spectacle. The bay chops under a winter wind. Flags at City Hall snap once and settle. In the grocery line, nobody says the date out loud. They say eggs, gas, paycheck, bills. The country keeps moving, but with a limp you only notice when the stairs are steep.

A line should have been drawn and held. Instead, it was drawn, mocked, and sold as merchandise. The lesson remains the same as it was the next morning: the difference between a nation and a crowd is whether rules outlast anger.