Watching the right wing delay health care reform brings back memories of the 50′s, when opponents of civil rights delayed action rather than inveigh against basic justice. The ‘go slow’ tactics that were in effect then pretended to have decent aims, while in fact seeking to hijack legislation that would give equal access to basic rights to all of our citizens. Do you recognize that masking of vile obstruction of part of our country’s people in their access to the same rights as the rest of us? Those of us who went through the freedom march era have seen it before. Going back to the drawing board on health care reform denies progress made over many years. The citizens are ready for it, not the confused and dismayed victims of do-gooding zealotry that the right once again tries to pretend the U.S. is composed of.

Tactics of protesting haste were common during the long, tortured advance of basic, civil, rights in this country. A famous LIFE article segment of three parts, this part was entitled "Go Slow, Now", and peddled the anti-integration theme; it ran in the edition dated March 12, 1956 (Vol.48, No.11), which headlined Ike Eisenhower’s decision to run for president for a second term despite poor health during the first term.

The magazine has to be viewed as a scanned document, and in it you can read that the first black student at the University of Alabama, Autherine Lucy, ‘was suspended after disorders followed her attendance at classes; (LIFE, Feb.20). The article features a major southern figure, William Faulkner, who wrote to LIFE magazine and was used to establish grounds for the Go Slow doctrine that we now see used against access to health care for all people;

Many antisegregationist southerners believe, as William Faulkner’s letter in LIFE magazine last week eloguently testified, the friends of the Negro have been trying to push integration faster than the Southerner will ever accept without resistance. …Desegregationists, then, have a double duty to talk softly, and, as Faulkner urges, "Go slow, now. Stop now, for a time, a moment."…"the reasonable people of the South are caught between two forces, one of them sitting down in the traces like a balky mule, the other trying to move it by setting firecrackers under its belly. Both attitudes are dangerous.

The go slow doctrine was reiterated in a series of essays published later about the early civil rights days. In one by George C. Wright, the doctrine was named; "Because of the logistics involved, the attitude of most whites to "go slow", and most importantly, the supreme Court decision to postpone for a year its final ruling on how school desegregation was to proceed…"

In another reversion to the process of civil rights establishment, in September of 1969, the Nixon administration again halted gains for the country by HEW Secretary Finch, withdrawing orders of action to bring desegregation previously issued to several Mississippi counties; "The letter said the action, prepared after analyses by several HEW experts, would bring "chaos" to the school districts… (Civil rights Division lawyers) broadened their criticism fronm that on schools to include the alleged "slowdown" on the whole civil rights issue."

No wonder that the party that hid its opposition to civil rights behind a screen of delicacy about southern sensibilities now beats back against equal access to health care by insisting on rewrites. The size of the bill, and its tackling of the needs of the country, give them palpitations.

Delicacy of feeling is not sufficient grounds for the obstruction of our constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare. By denying wellbeing to the less fortunate, the right wing once again uses barriers of social class as if they were sacred protections of the wealthy. Their usual class warfare against those with insufficient means to promote their own welfare is an old, dishonorable, tradition.

‘Go slow’ is not the way to bring the U.S. out of the ditch it has had dug in front of progress by the right wing. That old dog won’t hunt.