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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But picketing - picketing for or against something and handing out literature - these are conspicuously formal actions. They have to be understood as indirect communication.

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.

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.