Wings of a Bird

If only we could save them - Timothy Egan, guest columnist for the P-I
Two years ago, I drove to the town where I grew up to bury a boy I knew well enough to love but not enough to help. He was 17, my nephew, dead from a shotgun blast to the head fired by an acquaintance.
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You put a young man in the ground on a spring day and it changes you forever. I came home feeling like I would never let my own children out of the house again. I came home convinced there was something toxic about our age and theirs -- a collision of trash culture and children in adult bodies.
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A teenager in Wyoming is four times more likely to die of a traffic accident than a teenager in Washington, D.C. Seven of the top 10 areas in the country for underage binge drinking are in the West.
Growing up in Spokane, the biggest little city in Idaho, Montana and Eastern Washington, I was immortal -- especially when driving on a dirt road at the edge of town. And then I lost my two best friends to the kind of careless hubris that was the mark of those Saturday nights -- to two separate car accidents. ...