"If you're not doing anything wrong, but you think the FBI is following you around, then you have a persecution complex."

Really? In 1957, after (presumable) investigating me and apparently finding me to be relatively innocuous, two FBI agents came out to my house several times and tried to persuade me to tell them everything I knew about a long list of my friends and acquaintances. They also offered me "compensation" to attend certain meetings—and parties, including hootenannies—and keep tabs on certain people. Among the people they wanted me to watch and report on were three Quakers (one of whom was Walt Robertson, a Conscientious Objector who got drafted anyway), a teen-age girl whose grandfather had been a member of the IWW, and the daughter of a University of Washington philosophy professor whom Washington State's infamous Canwell Committee had tried to get fired for being, in their minds, too liberal in his views. I declined, telling them that all I wanted to do was get on with my music, and on the fourth visit they thanked me for my time and didn't come back.

Shortly thereafter, several new people showed up on Seattle's folk music scene. The scene was growing anyway, but one couldn't help but wonder which one (or more) of these new people. . . ? Is it really a "persecution complex" when you know damned well that you're being watched?

What was I doing wrong at the time that the FBI would want to investigate me in the first place? I was learning folk songs, I was taking lessons from a classic guitar teacher, I was earning a little spending money by giving guitar lessons, I was making arrangements to change my major at the U. of W. from English Lit. to Music, and I was singing everywhere I got the chance. The only organization I belonged to at the time was the YMCA, so I could go swimming. Oh, yes! I did vote for Adlai Stevenson!

I've been there and seen them in action. And I have no reason to believe that things have changed that much since then.

Now, I know that law enforcement is a hell of a nasty job. And I'm grateful that there are people out there who are willing to do it. But I've seen what "a gun and a badge" (even if only figurative) can do to the outlook of a lot of people (and not just the aforementioned FBI agents) who take up the profession, and this convinces me that the constitutional protections that private citizens have must never be eroded, no matter how expedient it may be in special circumstances like those we are under now. If we let those protections go, we'll never get them back.

And if that happens, the terrorists will have won.

Don Firth