In any other timeline, the storming of the United States Capital Building would have been a ‘snapshot moment’, one of those moments that people remember in a visceral and completely in-focus way. Historic examples of such events include the September 11 attacks, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, the moon landing and the Kennedy assassination. Of course, these are only a few and are mostly relevant to Americans, but the concept applies. I can say with certainty that I was in the clubhouse at a local golf course with my grandfather when we saw the breaking news of the World Trade Center being hit by a plane. We didn’t think too much of it, chalking it up to a terrible accident. However, by the time we returned after the front nine, it was painfully clear something much more significant had happened. Snapshot moment.

Personally, the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol is a snapshot moment: I was working in the emergency department conducting medication histories and seeing the events unfold on social media, trying to add my voice to the cacophony of speculation and opinion on (then) Twitter. It was a topic of discourse among the staff, but it’s not something we hear about not even five years later — it’s not something that will be taught or discussed in middle school history classes. Nobody’s great-grandchildren will come up to them in 50 years and ask “Where were you when they tried to take over the Capitol?”

I’m fairly confident that a time traveler returning to 1the early 19th century would find no shortage of people who would long remember the burning of the U.S. capital during the War of 1812. We still, after more than 80 years, can hear Pearl Harbour Day mentioned every December and Hawaii was not even a state in 1941. Why has the January 6th insurrection, an event in which more than one person died and the very heart of American democracy was occupied by hooligans (a more fun word than terrorists), been overlooked and not even relegated to a footnote? It should have been a ‘day of infamy’, but we have largely treated it as another average Wednesday in the land of the free.

How did we become so forgetful or, even worse, indifferent? If the mob forcing their way into the Capitol had been waving Chinese flags, we would be all be dead or living in nuclear bunkers. If it could have in any way, shape or form been connected to ISIS, we would have immediately started bombing somewhere (probably Iran). However, the people ransacking the offices of senators and threatening the life of the vice president were allowed to have their fun for much longer than what we would expect. Because they were wrapped in the co-opted flag of the country and pledged allegiance to Donald Trump, a proper response was delayed and an investigation into the events was turned into a partisan shitshow that demonstrated just how deep the GOP’s love for their president ran. A lot of people were sent to prison just for Trump 2.0 to pardon many of them later on, basically canonizing them in the Church of Trump. How do we just shrug that off?

I’ve written previously about how rapidly police are deployed and how overwhelming their response can be when protests and demonstrations against the elite develop. Furgeson in 2014 became a warzone. Los Angeles in 2025 also saw heavily armed LAPD and federal agents responding to protests and unrest around ICE operations in the city. Why was there such an enormous and forceful effort against those actors in those cities yet such a lack of response deployed in Washington? The questions of who knew what and who did (or didn’t) do which are not what I’m asking. Still, whether Donald Trump implicitly or explicitly encouraged the attack, whether the mayor of Washington, D.C. should or could have deployed the National Guard, even whether the attack was a ‘false flag operation‘ instigated by Antifa are all important questions — what is so astounding is that no one is asking them.

Most people, I feel, may have been alarmed but not surprised by the events of 6 January 2021. Trump had often made remarks about extending his stay in power regardless of what election results said. He always seemed more chummy with autocrats and kings than prime ministers. In some ways, the past 10 years or so have trained and conditioned the American electorate to accept the most wild and disturbing things as ordinary. We have become so accustomed to antics, scandal and outright criminal behavior from elected officials that when a bunch of people force their way into the Capitol and cause mayhem under the banner of a would-be emperor we don’t have the bandwidth anymore to dwell on it very long. The lack of shock and surprise might play into why this event has become so ignored in such a short period of time.

There is also, I think, a considerable amount of manufactured complacency surrounding the event. Because it became such a partisan issue, people felt they knew what they knew and nothing was going to change it and monitoring the investigations or protesting the pardons was pointless because nothing would happen and there was no recourse. We have been beaten down for so long by so many political, business and societal forces that the fire has been extinguished in many and so long as their own job is secure for this moment, why make waves. This complacency is not helped by social media that has effectively made protest something you do while sitting on the toilet even though, in the words of Don Henley, “armchair warriors often fail”.

Perhaps there is some psychological or sociological name for this blunting of what should have been a sharp stab of reality. I’m sure there are studies and papers written on how some things find a place in a society’s collective memory and some equally momentous things don’t, but I am no psychologist so I will have to continue to ask the questions in hopes the answer makes itself known.