I first encountered Terry in late 1992 when I started becoming active in the Free Burma movement. He had just helped lead a successful campaign to press Petro Canada to end its partnership with the Burmese military junta. Terry was now turning his attention to Pepsi's business in Burma.
In person, Terry was passionate yet withdrawn. Bearded and painfully thin, he seemed awkward socially. He became animated when explaining his causes to a new person. It was in his work of designing and writing eye-catching boycott leaflets that he especially sparkled.
Terry grasp of activist strategy was intuitive and keen. He was one of the first people to understand how a boycott of PepsiCo could ignite activism on Burma, particularly on college campuses. Pepsi products were both ubiquitous and essentially useless, he wisely pointed out. He helped design the first Pepsi boycott leaflets with the slogan: "Pepsi: Choice of a New Genocide" and stickers with a "Gotta Boycott" bar across the Pepsi logo.
By the time the Free Burma Coalition was founded in 1995, high school and college students already had a campaign they could make their own. The Pepsi boycott gripped over a hundred of campuses throughout North America. In the Fall of 1996 it was picked up with a vengeance by Third World First, a British campaigning organization with dozens of campus chapters. By January 1997, PepsiCo announced it was completely withdrawing from Burma. It was a major victory for Free Burma campus activists and Terry had supplied many of the tools and much of the inspiration.
The day after Terry died, people all around the country demonstated outside Suzuki dealerships to protest the company's investment in Burma. In New Haven, the owner locked several demonstrators inside his dealership and called the police, effectively closing down his own business. The locked-in demonstrators called the local press using a cellphone. The police let everyone leave without charges because they had done nothing wrong.
Terry would have loved it. ;-)