Opus 2011-68, Why Is there a Distortion Pedal?

I was listening to some music as I was studying and worshiping this morning.  On the second song I thought my I-pod was broken because the sound was breaking up.  Then I realized it was the distortion pedal.  If you are my age you might ask yourself, “What is a distortion pedal?”  Understanding this may help you understand where modern culture is going and what is wrong with the younger generation.

A distortion pedal is a foot controlled devise that is connected between the guitar and the speaker.  It is sometimes built into the amp or guitar itself.  It has only one purpose, to distort.  You take a perfectly good series of notes and make it sound like you are getting severe sun spot interference.  It is the kind of sound that drove people from AM to FM.  Now they do it on purpose.  Go figure.  I once bought a little devise I could plug into my electric guitar so I could plug earphones into it and practice without bothering anyone.  It was kind of cool.  It had three settings.  The first, the one I bought it for, was normal.  What you played was what you got.  Then it had a mild distortion.  Last it had extreme distortion.  People actually pay for this kind of thing.  They even have a line of different distortion pedals that give different effects.  This is capitalism at work.  It is almost enough to make me a socialist.

So you have an entire generation that thinks the point of music is to sound like fingernails on the blackboard.  Your music is considered boring because it does not make your hair stand up.  You thought their hair styles were strange?  No, it is just the product of listening to their music too long. 

Now this is not necessarily evil.  I would not mind it if it didn’t penetrate through the windows of my car as I drive.  When I am walking I can hear them practicing in the garage from blocks away.  It is their hearing that is being destroyed.  It used to be a free country.  But I think it has some social and spiritual applications.  A growing number of people are not happy unless they are being offensive.  The more people of low ability we get involved in the media the more we see and hear vulgar sights and sounds.  When I used to do summer camp counseling I was amazed at how a cabin full of junior high boys could giggle all night from one fart.  Now I see entire TV shows with this kind of theme.  Last time I watched the TV news there was a segment on someone’s pet pig while they ignored major world issues.  It is the distortion pedal gone amok.

People take the clear and simple teaching of the Bible and turn it into the strangest distortions.  Have you heard people denying that the Bible condemns homosexuality?  They are pushing on the distortion pedal.  I have read extended posts about how Jesus did not really rise physically from the dead, written by people who are ministers in Christian denominations.  I wonder what flavor of kool-aid they have been drinking.

We all need to beware of the danger of making our preferences the baseline for right and wrong.  I am aware of that.  But calling a Twinkie a carrot does not remove the calories.  Lets work to remove the figurative distortion pedals from our thinking. 

Who knows, maybe it will disconnect the physical pedals, too.

homo unius libri