As a member of Westboro Baptist Church, I became a fixture on picket lines across the country.

One of my earliest memories is of my father carrying me in one arm with a picket sign in the other.

I grew up with the white picket fence. My dad went to work nine to five, and he had a station wagon.

By neglecting education, the 1974 Labour government failed as surely as on the picket lines of Grunwick.

Any time someone carries a picket sign in front of the White House, that is the First Amendment in action.

When I was little, I didn't have dreams to be an actress or a star; I wanted to be a mom, have a house and a picket fence.

Like you see in the fairy tales, that's how it planned out in my head. Kids, little white picket fence, the American dream.

I've played hundreds of protests. I've marched on dozens of picket lines. I've strummed my guitar at innumerable demonstrations.

In a complex and troubling world, who wouldn't want to simplify? Everybody does. Everybody wants to simplify and put up a picket fence.

My dad was a miner at South Kirkby colliery. He went on strike but he didn't go to the picket line, he just put his feet up and got in my mum's way.

It's all kind of a big illusion: the white picket fence and the perfect marriage and the kids. Check that box off, check that box off, and move forward.

Everyone gives 'Picket Fences' credit for being so willing to delve into issues that now would be no big deal. But it was then. It was ahead of its time.

I had the blessing of opportunity. You need the folks in the boardroom who have consciences and the people in the streets who can picket at the right time.

Without 'Twin Peaks,' there would have been no 'Northern Exposure,' 'Picket Fences,' 'X-Files' or 'Alias.' It started the movement of 'off-center' television.

My mother birthed three children and she adopted myself and another African-American son. My adoptive parents were Finnish. I grew up in a white picket neighborhood.

Jeremy Corbyn's election was the most hopeful thing since the Labour Party began. He's the first Labour leader who's ever stood on the picket line along with workers.

I think once you meet me, you realize I'm not necessarily some soft yoga guy. I've been on the picket line. I've been in the union halls. I'll drink a Miller Lite with you.

We had violence directed at us by the growers themselves, trying to run us down by cars, pointing rifles at us, spraying the people when they were on the picket line with sulfur.

I'm very traditional. I want to have kids. I want to be - not a stay-at-home mom, but to be able to take care of my kids and have a family and cook. A white picket fence and a dog.

Everyone saw me on TV or read articles, and it was all about my great marriage, the white picket fence, all this success and my perfect life. But behind the scenes, it was a struggle.

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

I had grown up seeing people in school where I felt like I needed to keep them at arm's length, or on the picket line, where there was a tonne of hostility and no time to build rapport with people.

When I was a kid I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I did know what I didn't want to do. I didn't want to grow up, have 2.2 kids, get married, the whole white picket fence thing.

I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

If you don't like the President, it costs you 90 bucks to fly to Washington to picket. If you don't like the governor, it costs you 60 bucks to fly to Albany to picket. If you don't like me - 90 cents.

I never expected anyone to take care of me, but in my wildest dreams and juvenile yearnings, I wanted the house with the picket fence from June Allyson movies. I knew that was yearning like one yearns to fly.

Life is not living in the suburbs with a white picket fence. That's not life. Somehow our American culture has made it out that that's what life needs to be - and that if it's not that, it's all screwed up. It's not.

The suburbs have this veneer of happiness, you know? This veneer of the ideal life. From afar, it's all together - white picket fence, nice house - but you peel away one little layer, and it all comes crumbling down.

I remember at the age of five travelling on a trolley car with my mother past a group of women on a picket line at a textile plant, seeing them being viciously beaten by security people. So that kind of thing stayed with me.

I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.

I used to live with my grandmother. I used to wonder why the other kids in school went home with their mothers and fathers. I wanted to be the guy that got married. I wanted to be the guy with the children and the white picket fence. I never had that.

As a left-wing campaigner for 35 years, I've been arrested on picket lines, led anti-imperialist demonstrations and spoken at anti-deportation protests outside police stations. I've made speeches at street rallies, in prisons and universities and at pubs.

Politicians and lawmakers are willing to watch us take us a knee, watch us march, watch us picket and protest - and wait us out. They are willing and prepared to outlast us - and, in most cases, to do absolutely nothing about the problems we highlight and amplify.

There have been times when I've felt inappropriately emotional. I remember making 'The Most Hated Family in America' about the Westboro Baptist Church, and being on the way to a funeral of a U.S. soldier with the Phelps family; they were going to picket the funeral.

As happy as we were in our backyard jumping on trampolines, it was the same general feeling, often euphoria, on the picket line, because we felt like the way our lives were falling on to us contorted with the people of God and the scriptures. It all felt very normal.

By August 2008, we had left Voikovskaya and moved into a wooden dacha in the artists' colony of Sokol in north-west Moscow. The house was a haven amid the madness of the city: lily of the valley grew near our front gate, Virginia creeper decked the green picket fence.

Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.

It's funny, because even though on a drama like 'Picket Fences' those long monologues would stress me out, doing special effects where there's a green screen and there's nobody there to to react to and you have to recite all this dialogue, it's so much more difficult.

Because of the dynamics on the picket line all my life, I had these expectations of people. It was all the things that I had learned about outsiders from the time I was tiny, that they were evil, that if they were being nice to me they were trying to seduce me away from the truth.

Society has changed so dramatically that it's empowered the individual, and technology has a lot to do with that. Years ago, if you had a bad experience at a restaurant, you could complain to the manager. Maybe you could picket. Now, you go online and write a review that may go viral.

I don't know a lot of show runners. I mean I met a lot of them in picket lines. I'm not part of a, like, secret society or pickup basketball game. As far as I'm concerned, pick-up basketball games are secret societies. They confuse me. I've never been a networker or I've never been very social.

My dreams were always small and puny. All I ever needed was a little house with a little picket fence by the sea. Little did I know that I would live in Malacanang Palace for 20 years and visit all the major palaces of mankind. And then also meet ordinary citizens and the leaders of superpowers.

Whenever people would speculate about the death of my grandfather it was always this very retributive thing. That they were going to picket his funeral after all the things that he had done to so many other people. That vindictiveness is obviously completely understandable. It would make perfect sense.

The Huffingtonpost.com does not pay its writers. Tina Brown's thedailybeast.com does pay its writers. You have to be paid because this is not a hobby. You have to keep that standard. You can't ask grandpa to loan you money because you have to go to Afghanistan. I walked the picket line for that to continue.

I'm sorry - I know America is supposed to be the land of the dreams and hopes, but it's like, when was that actually a real thing? I think from the very beginning it was all a lie, and it still kind of is. Stop trying to sell the picket fence, because there's another backyard here that you haven't looked at.

I'm not a union guy in the sense that I know a lot about how they operate. But I know fighters. They are individual athletes. This is not a team sport. I think it's going to be hard to say, 'Hey, do you mind not fighting on Saturday and walking around the arena with a picket sign instead?' I just don't see it.

Yeah, you got the family dog and the white picket fence, and you just think that's all there is. Some of us had to grow up in poverty-stricken urban neighborhoods, and we just had to adapt to our environment. I know that it's wrong. But people act like it's some crazy thing they never heard of. They don't know.

I wanted to live in the suburbs and have a white picket fence and my own bedroom. And a staircase - I thought having a staircase meant that you were a normal family. I thought somehow if you could transplant us to the suburbs, we would become a normal family. But in retrospect, I'm so grateful I grew up in the Chelsea.

I was a blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked five-year-old when I joined my family on the picket line for the first time. My mom made me leave my dolls in the minivan. I'd stand on a street corner in the heavy Kansas humidity, surrounded by a few dozen relatives, with my tiny fists clutching a sign that I couldn't read yet: 'Gays are worthy of death.'

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