Back in December, Jeremy Beightol was kind enough to produce a piece of art to run alongside the editor’s LETTER for ONE #8. As the first issue of 2008, there was no doubt the issue was forged from a pioneering spirit of heading into the future, but a multi-part documentary on the History channel hosted by Tom Brokaw had pointed out that we were at the threshold of the 40th anniversary of a seminal time in American history—1968. This realization quickly added the key ingredients of inspiration to the editorial concept, and so described to the artist with broad strokes of late-’60s civil unrest, the rise of commercialism and corporatism, War(s) and their industry, and how it all paralleled today’s current events, this is what Jeremy’s imagination spit out. Follow the link below to read the editorial it accompanied, and click on the picture to see a bigger version.

40 years ago this year shit jumped off in this country like it never had before. The year was 1968, and that year not only were Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Andy Warhol gunned down, but as the rise of student protest swept the country, ultimately building towards the mayhem of the Chicago Democratic Convention, America was essentially ripped apart by conflicting ideas. Whether protesting the still-escalating Vietnam War, Racism, Sexism, or just politics-as-usual, those unhappy with America’s direction went to great lengths, facing grave consequences, to express their beliefs.

Today, amidst two suspiciously unjust wars, the brink of a recession, government waste and scandal of a record-setting scale, and the homestretch of a fiercely fought presidential campaign, we Americans, and the whole world really, find ourselves on the edge of a great precipice. The outcome of the next twelve months will decide at least four years of policy, but the immediate impact is as potentially volatile as it is unpredictable. And yet the passions of those most opposed to the status quo seem like mere ripples in a pond compared to the tsunamic proportions of our predecessors. People my parents’ age were out fighting the police in the streets, and by all accounts I’ve come across, these people believed they could change the system. They could WIN. That’d we’d all win really, because they’d end racism, and the war, and halt corruption in government, and so on.

Of course, these idealistic goals would most likely go on as unfulfilled as those of our era (way to block that war funding Congress), but then many writers of the time like Alan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson felt the energy too. Thompson wrote about it often, the communal energy of the youth movement, but most famously in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” — “We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

And he says it there. “The high water mark.” “Broke and rolled back.” The dream didn’t work. The system won. Nixon won the election. Stoolies and political muscle fixed it all up right. The military industrial complex was thrown into high gear.

Now copy and repeat that pattern for the next forty years, right up here to where we all stand, neck-deep in the bullshit. Surely there is a lesson in there, but what is it? Should we kick ourselves for our learned apathy, which so stylishly replaced activism as the social catalyst of cool? But then all the scrapping with the cops and marching in the streets is what got us to where we are. Maybe it’s like Weather Underground founder Mark Rudd said in an interview this year with Tom Brokaw on the outcome of his efforts of the ‘60s: “Leaders don’t make movements… a movement makes it’s leaders.”

So there’s the rub. We can’t control everything, or predict an outcome, but we can participate. We can DO something, but we can’t know what we’ll get from it. And once we get going, we can’t fall asleep at the wheel, or get burnt out from patting ourselves on the backs like our forbearers four decades ago. Which, I guess, means that you better make smart decisions, and let the company you keep and the actions you execute speak loudly. Let’s at least learn from our revolutionary predecessors. You don’t have to get out there in the streets, burning undergarments and dodging tear gas, but at least work to have your voice heard, both on and off your skates.

Justin Eisinger

Editorial Director

January 2008