March 6, 2000 Features Special issue: Election 2000 The First Stone BY JOEL BLEIFUSS Vanishing voters. Gush vs. Bore BY DOUG IRELAND Free Ride BY PAT MURPHY Meet the real John McCain. Cash and Carry BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR George W. Bush's environmental menace. Fair Weather Friends BY JUAN GONZALEZ Candidates court the Latino vote. More Marketplace Medicine BY DAVID MOBERG Neither Democrats' health plan will fix the system. News & Views Editorial BY SALIM MUWAKKIL At death's door. A Terry Laban Cartoon The Highest Possible Price BY FRED WEIR Russia refuses to learn from its mistakes in Chechnya. Secrets and Lies BY STEVEN DUDLEY After a failed uprising, Ecuador's indigenous groups warn a civil war could ensue. Dirt Road Rage BY GEOFF SCHUMACHER Wise-users intimidate Nevada wilderness advocates. Appall-O-Meter BY DAVID FUTRELLE Profile BY SILJA J. A. TALVI Bert Sacks: A voice in the wilderness. The Flanders Files BY LAURA FLANDERS Natural born rapists. Culture Bohemian Raphsody BY SANDY ZIPP Studio apartments, grape nuts, S/M and Buffy. Shock Treatment BY JOSHUA ROTHKOPF FILM: The cinema of mental hygiene.

Voice in the Wilderness By Silja J. A. Talvi Growing up as a Jew in Boston in the '40s, Bert Sacks overheard many anxious conversations about the Holocaust. The experience left a profound impression. "I Bert Sacks used to hear, 'Where were all the good Germans? Why didn't they help the Jews?' " he recalls. "I would wonder what I would have done if I had been born Christian and German during that time. Would I have had the courage to help?" Sacks, a 57-year-old software engineer from Seattle, is staying in a Catholic church in Washington, D.C., several weeks into a month-long fast. He and nine other members of Voices in the Wilderness, a Chicago- based humanitarian group (www.nonviolence.org/vitw), began the fast on January 15, a date which marks both the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ninth anniversary of the begining of the Gulf War. Though Sacks had no background in civil disobedience and had sat out the protests of the '60s and '70s, he was outraged by the television coverage of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the pandemic anti-Arab sentiment the war fostered, and the widespread indifference of so many Americans to the killing of Iraqi civilians. "That, more than the war itself, shocked me deeply," he says.     TOP HOME SUBSCRIBE MAIL   In These Times © 2000 Volume 24, Number 7