The Steady Ones: A Theory of Repair in an Age of Rupture
On the moral physics of chaos, care, and who gets remembered
I. The Mad Ones and Their Debris
"The only people for me are the mad ones," declared Jack Kerouac, establishing what would become the foundational myth of American counterculture: that meaning lives in madness, that transcendence requires self-immolation, that the only authentic response to an inauthentic world is to burn like a roman candle across the stars.
But Kerouac never wrote about the morning after. He never lingered to watch someone sweep up the glass from his exploded candle, never asked who would wash the scorch marks from the walls. In the grammar of the Beats, such concerns were beneath notice—the domain of squares, conformists, the spiritually dead.
This omission wasn't accidental. It was structural. The myth of the mad ones requires the invisibility of the steady ones to maintain its moral coherence. Because to acknowledge the cleanup crew is to admit that your transcendence came at someone else's expense.
II. The Externalization of Chaos
Every act of romantic destruction creates what we might call the externalization of chaos—moral displacement masquerading as meaning. This is the hidden physics of spectacle: energy is neither created nor destroyed, merely relocated from those who generate chaos to those least equipped to absorb it.
Consider the scene at the end of Pink Floyd's The Wall, where people pick through bricks and debris after a fascist riot. The camera lingers on hands gathering fragments, faces marked by exhaustion rather than ideology. These are not the people who wrote the slogans or carried the flags. They are the inheritors of someone else's psychic breakdown, tasked with the unglamorous work of making the world habitable again.
The same dynamic played out in Portland during the 2020 protests. While genuine rage against police brutality fueled the demonstrations, the nightly theater of clash began to consume more than it clarified. When the tear gas cleared, who swept the sidewalks? Who boarded the windows? Often, it was the small business owners, the neighbors, the people who never asked to become characters in this mythology but found themselves tasked with its material aftermath.
This is what we mean by the externalization of chaos: the systematic displacement of consequences from the mythmakers to the caretakers, from those who perform transcendence to those who maintain continuity.
III. The Counter-Manifesto
Against this backdrop, consider an alternative vision:
"The only people for me are the ones who clean up after the mad ones—the steady ones, the ones who are sane enough to bring a fire extinguisher, patient enough to listen, and wise enough to know when to walk away from flying candle debris. The ones who yawn not from boredom, but exhaustion, who speak not to be saved but to say, 'Take your spiders and your stars—I'll be over here, building something that lasts.'"
—Probably Someone's Ex-Girlfriend, Never Cited in a Beat Poem
This isn't merely a rebuttal to Kerouac; it's a complete rejection of his moral framework. Where he sees transcendence in chaos, this voice sees the unglamorous but essential work of repair. Where he celebrates those "mad to be saved," this voice speaks from a different register entirely: not salvation but sustainability, not ecstasy but endurance.
The line "Take your spiders and your stars—I'll be over here, building something that lasts" is particularly devastating because it refuses the very premise of romantic salvation. It doesn't try to out-mad the mad ones or compete for their kind of attention. It writes in a different moral grammar altogether—one grounded in interdependence rather than individualism, in care rather than catharsis.
IV. Toward a Theory of Revolutionary Care
What emerges from this tension is not another false binary between revolution and reaction, but something more nuanced: the possibility of revolutionary care—change that accounts for its own costs, disruption that builds as it burns.
This requires us to develop new cultural archetypes beyond the tired opposition of the rebel and the conformist. The steady ones represent a third way: not against change but for repair, not against passion but for accountability, not anti-fire but pro-hearth.
A theory of revolutionary care might begin with these truths:
Spectacle is sticky; repair is silent. Our attention economy rewards the dramatic gesture over the patient work of rebuilding. But moral labor—the work of holding communities together after they've been torn apart—rarely makes it into history books or viral tweets.
Not all chaos is liberation. We've inherited a dangerous conflation: madness equals authenticity equals transcendence. But this logic never asks who suffers from your transcendence, who inherits the debris of your self-actualization.
Care as resistance. In a world addicted to collapse, the radical act might be showing up consistently, maintaining structures that allow life to continue, choosing the boring work of tending over the exciting work of burning.
Myth privileges the volatile. The people who become legends are often those who make the most noise or the biggest mess. But myth is not memory. Myth erases the janitor, the caretaker, the friend who kept you alive long enough to write your poem.
V. The Dignity of Endurance
This is not an argument against all disruption or a defense of the status quo. The steady ones are not conservatives in any political sense—they're conservators in the deepest sense, people who understand that some things are worth preserving even as others must be transformed.
They represent what we might call the moral durability that makes change possible. Revolution without repair is just destruction; repair without revolution is just stagnation. But repair as revolution—the patient work of building better structures, of tending to the casualties of change, of ensuring that transformation doesn't become another form of abandonment—this might be what actual progress looks like.
In our current moment of cascading crises and perpetual upheaval, the steady ones offer a different model of heroism. Not the hero who burns brightest, but the hero who burns longest. Not the one who makes the most dramatic gesture, but the one who's still there in the morning, broom in hand, ready to begin again.
VI. Coda: Poetry for the Cleanup Crew
Perhaps what we need now is not another manifesto celebrating beautiful destruction, but poetry for the ones who mop the blood, sweep the glass, and rebuild what others have—however ecstatically—broken. Poetry for the ex-girlfriends and cleanup crews, the small business owners and neighborhood volunteers, all those who never get cited in the beat poems but without whom the beats themselves could never have survived to write.
This is not about choosing sides between romantic revolt and civic responsibility. It's about understanding that the most profound meaning often emerges not from their opposition but from their collision—in the space where someone's stars meet someone else's broom, where the mad ones and the steady ones encounter each other in the shared work of making a world.
The only people for me, it turns out, might be the ones who understand that both the candle and the cleanup crew are holy. That both the fire and the fire extinguisher are necessary. That both the spiders across stars and the hands that sweep up the ash are part of the same sacred work of being human together on this fragile, flammable planet.
"Take your spiders and your stars—
I'll be over here,
building something that lasts."
The quiet revolution begins with this refusal: to be collateral in someone else's mythology, to inherit chaos without consent, to clean up after gods who never learned to wash their own dishes. It begins with the radical act of saying: my care matters, my endurance has meaning, my willingness to show up tomorrow is as beautiful as your willingness to burn today.
And maybe that's enough. Maybe that's everything.