The Vermont Chapter of the Sierra Club had arranged for this hearing, held in the stately granite building that looks like a small prototype of the Texas Capitol. Apparently, some Vermonters are waking from their long utopian dream of environ-mental purity and moral rectitude, and they're having second thoughts about shipping their nuke waste to Texas. The committee chairman, state Senator Elizabeth Ready, acknowledged, "Some of us don't feel very good about it."

So badly do environmentally sensitive Vermonters feel that about forty of them listened for two hours while Oliver, Flanders, and Curry delivered their message in no uncertain terms: Sierra Blanca, which was chosen for purely political reasons, is environmentally no better suited than Vermont for burying nuclear waste. And after the West Texans got through lambasting federal, state, and local politicians from all three Compact states, as well as the nuclear utility lobbyists whom they hold responsible for arranging things this way, several of the Vermonters in the audience stood up and apologized.

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Before the rally Sanders invited the three West Texans to meet with him privately, and the Texans eagerly agreed. The meeting was no longer than Sanders' attention span — when it comes to Sierra Blanca. "He didn't listen," Curry said. "He had his mind made up." Afterward, Bernie was giving his pro forma campaign speech, never mentioning nuclear power or nuclear waste. Sierra Blanca activist Bill Addington, who'd arrived just that morning to join the march, along with his neighbor Marfa Mendez, had had enough, and he yelled from the crowd, "What about my home, Bernie? What about Sierra Blanca?"

Several others joined in. "What about Sierra Blanca, Bernie?" Sanders left the stage, which surprised no one in the small Texas delegation. Ear-lier, he had told them, "My position is un-changed, and you're not gonna like it." When they asked if he would visit the site in Sierra Blanca, he said, "Absolutely not. I'm gonna be running for re-election in the state of Vermont."