The Unmovable Sink
A.R. Moxon
Mar 23, 2025
How do you make impossible things possible? Same way anyone ever did: By trying.
snip
McMurphy wants to go to a bar and watch the World Series on television. The other patients point out that this is not possible, given their incarceration. So McMurphy makes them a bet: he will break out by lifting the huge industrial sink connected to the middle of the ward floor, and throwing it out the window. Beer and baseball await. Nobody thinks McMurphy can do it. McMurphy insists he not only can, but will.
He fails, of course. He's just not big enough. He doesn't have the leverage. He doesn't have the strength.
"But I tried, goddammit, didn't I?" McMurphy asks them, glowering. "At least I did that."
snip snip snip
One thing I take from this sequence is that even unmovable sinks are movable; once somebody introduces the idea of moving it, what's impossible can suddenly become possible. This suggests that it is very powerful to believe the possibility of impossible things. Another takeaway for me is that people tend to be poor judges of what is possible, and mostly tend to cede to others the parameters within which possibility can be pursued. This suggests that it is very important to take control of the boundaries of the possible, because doing so expands those boundaries. Another takeaway for me is that efforts that fail at first—even efforts that are doomed to fail at first—are not wasted efforts; especially not if the sink really needs to be moved. This suggests that if we really believe in the necessity of something, we should consider even the effort to achieve it to be a victory—not a moral victory, but an actual victory, because it is exactly this effort that brings victory out of the realm of the impossible and into the realm of the possible.
I think about it these days, because we've got an unmovable sink called supremacy, and a lot of people have decided that the best way to deal with it is to make sure we don't waste any effort moving it—not because it doesn't need to be moved, but because many people would rather avoid effort.
There are a lot of ways to not move the sink. All you need is a reason, and any reason will do.
There's only one way to move it, and that's by trying.
(more snip snip snip, you really have to read it to fill it in )
Here's one last takeaway on the subject of sink-moving: People who stand for something have vision, and people with vision tend to capture people's imagination, even if that vision is hateful and abusive and unsustainable and disconnected from reality, as the supremacist vision is.
People who seek only to find the middle don't stand for anything. What is the middle? Nowhere, really. It's just a point between poles. Moving the poles is harder work, so those who seek ease ignore the poles entirely by deciding that poles are unmovable, and in so doing, they cede the whole battleground to those who actually care about something—good or evil. It's a morally and strategically vacuous position, utterly lacking in vision, and it won't capture anyone's imagination. Such empty and movable vessels may be useful if we actually succeed in moving the sink simply because they don't oppose anything, they'll flow smoothly into the new possible that has been defined for them, but they won't help anyone move anything until the work is already done.
So let's do what is strategic and practical and smart and realistic: let's be movers of the immovable sink. Let's have a vision, and let's join with others who have vision. Leave those without to their cramped view of what is possible, and let them do whatever marginal and cramped good they can do within the unnatural constraints they've placed on themselves.
Let's determine that we're going to grapple and grab and lift and heave and do whatever we can to move supremacy's sink. Let's determine we won't stop until it goes right out the window where it belongs, which probably means we won't ever stop, because centuries of brave and determined people moved it without ever seeing it out the window. While we have strength left, we'll drag it as far as we can. And maybe we'll get it out the window. If we keep believing its possible, eventually somebody will.
Let's do it even if it's unpopular, even if it's divisive, even if its dauting, even if it's impossible, because when the necessary thing is impossible, then constraining ourselves only what is possible is not only immoral—it's impractical.
We might not be the ones who succeed, but we're going to try. We're going to do that much. And others will see us imagine that we can do the impossible, and start to imagine that they can do it, too, and someday, someday, they will be right about that.
Is success guaranteed? It never is when you actually stand for something. Success is guaranteed for people who only want to move to the middle of whatever other people have decided is possible. But we don't get to not try to move the unmovable sink. We owe that much to those who came before us. We owe that much to those who will come after.
Will it move? It might. But at least we tried, goddammit. At least we did that.
https://www.the-reframe.com/the-unmovable-sink/
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