How I Almost Got Put on the Domestic Terrorist List for Handing Out Leaflets

The following is an excerpt from The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men Who Are Saving The Planet, edited by Emily Hunter (Conari Press, 2011).

Eco-Terrorism 101

If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it. —Billy Bragg

It started with a knock on the door. Someone had pounded three times. I turned the knob without looking through the peephole. It must be the landlord, I thought. He had gotten into the habit of arriving unannounced with prospective tenants to show our apartment, one of the freshly renovated studios in a 70-something-year-old building in Chicago. Before I had opened the door, though, I knew it was not Steve the Landlord. Our dogs were barking. Wildly. The dogs, Mindy and Peter, were snarling, and they never snarled, they never growled. I opened the door anyway.

The guys behind it—gruff-looking early-30s guys with manicured goatees, navy suits, ties with outdated geometric patterns, scuffed black shoes, broad shoulders, hardjaw lines, wholesome haircuts, and eyes looking for fights—were just naturally FBI agents. I didn’t even need to see the badges.

I just said I was in a hurry, that I had to get ready for work, and then I started to close the door. The good cop—well, I will call him the good cop, only because he looked less eager to kick my ass—put his left palm on the gray steel door, firmly enough to put pressure but not firmly enough to make any noise. I could either come downstairs, he said, or they could make a visit to my place of work, the Chicago Tribune.

Dogs barked. Panic. I was not afraid of them, but I was afraid of a spectacle in the newsroom. I relented and then closed the door to get ready.

“What’s going on?” my girlfriend, Kamber, asked from the futon, half asleep.

“It’s the FBI,” I said matter-of-factly, as if it had been Steve the Landlord.

A few minutes later, we crammed into the freight elevator, good cop, bad cop, and me. The elevator ground to a halt, the latticework steel door creaked open, and we walked through the dark hallway to the alley. It was a gloriously sunny Chicago summer day, but the sunlight could not overcome the condominium towers of steel and glass, could not swim through the cracks in the walls, and so I stepped into an alley shrouded in gray.

In college, I had learned about government operations like the counter intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), and the FBI’s history of harassing and intimidating political activists. False names, phone taps, bugs, and infiltration were used in attempts to disrupt groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian movement, and Students for a Democratic Society. I had learned from books, professors, and Law & Order episodes that if approached by the FBI, for any reason, you should never talk. Nothing good can come of it.

Both good cop and bad cop had heard that line before. The shorter, “nicer” cop started talking anyway.

“Look, we just want to talk to you,” he said. “We want you to help us out. We can make all this go away.”

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Working long hours on the metro desk at the Chicago Tribune, covering shooting after shooting, murder after murder, had turned me into the type of reporter I never wanted to become. I felt detached, apathetic, and cynical. Just before the visit from the FBI, I wrote in my journal, “I’m tired of writing meaningless stories, I’m tired of going to sleep at night feeling like I left the world the same way I saw it in the morning.”

After only a few months at the Tribune, I had already built a spectacular wall of emotional detachment. It felt as if it were made of broken bottles and concrete chunks, sharp and gray. I thought I would never survive this beat, unless i found some way to keep a toehold on my humanity. So I decided to go leafleting.