A day did not go by that Dylan McKenzie did not think about the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall”. His mother had given him nightmares telling him stories about how the large companies were poisoning the environment.
“Someday even the rain will be made up of poisonous, toxic chemicals,” she’d told him. “And it will fall on everyone and cause horrible diseases and painful deaths.”
She spoke of the future violence to come when children carried weapons and fought in the streets. He’d once read the lyrics, but it had been like a Rubik’s cube to his young brain and he’d latched onto his mother’s wisdom and had turned Bob Dylan into his own personal idol and prophet.
As he grew older he began to wonder why nobody stopped the chemical companies, why the people of his mother’s generation were so intent on peaceful solutions, when obviously they didn’t work, and why did they spend so much time smoking pot and wiling away the days when so much work needed to be done?
Flower Power. What a cop out that turned out to be. Fear and intimidation were the only ways to get people to do what you wanted.
He had learned that much from his dad, who’d once been a flower child himself, but had since learned the real ways of the world. He’d seen his dad push people around and noticed how they backed off and let him get his own way. Dylan knew the shame of letting his dad intimidate him. But he’d always just been a kid. The day would come when the old man wouldn’t be pushing on him anymore.
Click here to read the rest of the chapter: http://rubiconranch.wordpress.com/2010/11/14/chapter-4-dylan-mckenzie-by-nancy-a-niles/
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Rubicon Ranch is a collaborative and innovative crime series set in the fictional desert community of Rubicon Ranch and is being written online by authors of Second Wind Publishing.
Dragon My Feet 
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