It's February 1960. Six years after Brown v. Board of Education, more than four years after the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott. Congress is debating what could best be described as a woefully inadequate civil rights bill.
What did it do? According to our friends at Wikipedia,
[it] established federal inspection of local voter registration polls and introduced penalties for anyone who obstructed someone's attempt to register to vote or actually vote.
The bill was weak. It failed to get at the heart of discrimination in voting, things like poll taxes and literacy clauses. Even still, numerous southern Democratic senators opposed the bill, so much that it spawned the longest filibuster in American history, 43 hours, before that filibuster was finally defeated and the bill passed.
So it was a terribly weak, ineffective bill, that was still very difficult to pass. Why even pass it? How could a weak bill help anything?
Simple: as weak and inadequate as it was, it move the process forward, even incrementally towards civil rights.
Then the PEOPLE took over!
Through massive sit-ins at lunch counters across America
Through boycotts of retailers (e.g., Woolworth's) that followed segregated practices in their southern stores
Through enormous marches and rallies (from the March on Washington to Selma)
Through massive efforts to organize people across America to work for civil rights
In less than a decade, this weak, inadequate bill had spawned far more progressive legislation, including (1) the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (job discrimination/public accommodations, (2) the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and (3) the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
So what can we learn from the Civil Rights of 1960?
Let's pass the healthcare bill, warts and all (and there are plenty of warts) and then, MASSIVELY organize.
I don't mean just a few small protests and occasional sit-ins.
I mean-
DAILY sit-ins at EVERY major insurance company in America by all who have been denied coverage, or denied needed treatments
Organizing as MANY Americans as possible to lobby for single payer healthcare in their communities
Organizing enormous rallies in Washington DC, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, as well as Little Rock, Des Moines, Birmingham and Springfield for single payer healthcare. Let's have an annual "National Healthcare Day" where people from across the country lobby for truly progressive healthcare (and single payer medicare for all).
This can be done, but ONLY with MASSIVE effort on the part of the American people. Would the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed without such an outpouring of effort? No, NO, NO!
Let's make the 2010s the decade America FINALLY gains single payer healthcare for all. We can do this!