My friend Tim Harris is the founder and director of Seattle’s award-winning street paper, Real Change, and current president of the North American Street Newspapers Association. These days, he’s also the devoted father of a pair of charming 3-year-old twin daughters. Though Tim would squirm at the idea, surely he’s become one of Seattle’s most admired and productive citizens. He’s even been fictionalized—favorably—by Sherman Alexie in the New Yorker!

But Tim has been in a self-revealing mood these past couple of weeks. In a series of memoir tales, he has surprised those of us who thought we knew him, by describing his youth as a troubled time dominated by drinking, drugs, loveless sex, truly outrageous behavior, and complete alienation from conventional mores and institutions. I have to admit: it’s a pretty fun read.

But a question remains: What transformed the youthful Tim into the one we know now? We can’t yet know because he hasn’t gotten that far in his memoir writing. But reading his stories brought to my mind a character from one of my very favorite movies, The Sorrow and the Pity, by Marcel Ophuls.

In the 1960s, Ophuls interviewed many people who had lived in the French city of Clermont-Ferrand when it was occupied by the Nazis during World War II. Those interviews make up his riveting 4-hour film. The film is full of images of people—generally from the most acceptable levels of society—uncomfortably rationalizing how they had accommodated themselves to Nazi rule. Watching, it was all too easy for me to imagine myself in their shoes and to recognize the immense difficulty of acting otherwise. I had to ask myself—as I’m sure Ophuls intended me to do—whether I would have done just as they did. Most had not been overtly bad people, and most were sympathetic characters—it’s just that they had not done anything significant to resist their occupiers. And as for me, I had to ask: Could I ever have found the courage to stand up against that frightening regime, or to act to protect Jews, dissidents, and other imperiled people around me? Could I ever have hidden someone in my attic, hearing the footsteps of storm troopers in the streets below?

The film also shows a handful of people who did find the courage to resist. There were two farmer brothers, for example, who refused to see themselves as special in any way, and explained matter-of-factly that they had joined the Resistance because “well, obviously, it was the only thing to do.”

Most memorable of all the characters—the one who still often comes to my mind—was a man who had become one of the greatest leaders of the Resistance. He was asked how he had found it in himself to do that. His explanation will gently resound in the back of my mind for the rest of my life: For the bourgeois, it would have been very difficult, probably impossible. But for him, it had been relatively easy, because he had been the town roué. Since he was already a social outcast, he had had nothing to lose by acting courageously.

We'll have to wait for Tim's story. But meanwhile, we can wonder whether he and the Resistance leader, were they to share a good vin rouge at a sidewalk table, might find some common ground.

This week, I’ve learned that when I judge too hastily, I can miss out on something really worth noticing. Not that I didn't know that, conceptually--but it's so very easy to miss seeing the judgments arising in one's own mind!

This past weekend, I talked with S, a lawyer friend who is a skillful birder. S has been enjoying watching the flocks of starlings living in the marshland adjacent to the University of Washington. He’s been amused to discover that these starlings have learned to mimic the sound of cell phones so well that people sometimes check their phones to see whether they’re ringing.

Since S mentioned this interesting finding, I’ve been paying much more attention to starlings. Researching them on the Internet, I’ve found that they’ve been observed to mimic everything from human speech to car alarms, as well as the calls of many other birds. And indeed, while walking along the lakeshore listening to starlings this week, I’ve heard them make a variety of calls, including one that sounds like a series of beeps (maybe an imitation of a frustrated motorist?). What could be the purpose of so much mimicry? I can only wonder at the starlings’ intentions—and at my own failure to notice such an obvious phenomenon!

Now I’m really interested in starlings! Until now, I’d dismissed them as not really worthy of attention. Reflecting, I see that my lack of interest has been founded in judgment. Because I know that starlings are a nonnative species that successfully competes with native bird species for nesting habitat, I’ve thought of them as a problem species—a kind of living trash—rather than as something to delight in, as I delight in many other birds. And because I see so many of them so often, I had taken them to be something ordinary and uninteresting—not exciting like an uncommon species. As I let my judgments go this week, I finally can appreciate them for themselves, and life is richer for it.

Senegal, West Africa, 1983:
Dusk was falling when the “bush taxi,” a battered Peugeot station wagon, pulled into a tiny desert town to stop for the night and let me out. I was a Peace Corps Volunteer, on my way home to my own village far downriver, but I could go no farther until morning. I knew no one in the town, and there was no hostel or hotel in that remote place. But—Allah akbar!—I had no concern, since everyone in rural Senegal knows and follows an ancient rule: Offer shelter to those who need it. Soon, I had been invited home for the night by one of the women packing up her stall in the town’s small market.

When I was young, I traveled widely. In Senegal and elsewhere, I was offered shelter when I most needed it, and sometimes just because I was a visitor.

Seattle, 1995:
I was a new volunteer at the Saturday Night Youth Shelter at University Baptist Church, and I had arrived at the locked door of the church too early for my first assignment. I joined a homeless man resting on the doorstep as I waited for other volunteers to arrive with the key. “How is it that Seattle’s churches stay locked at night,” he asked me, “while thousands of people sleep in the streets? Why not open them so people can come in to sleep? Aren’t they supposed to be places of sanctuary?”

I'm sure I know why the churches remain locked—the reasons are not much different from mine when I lock my own door each night. But I can never be fully reconciled to the situation. What if by some djinn’s magic a market woman were conducted out of Senegal’s desert and into Seattle on a typical night? She would be awed by the abundant evidence of material prosperity. She would be astonished by the grandeur of Seattle’s tall buildings, elegant shops, and bright skyline. But I know that she would be most amazed to find that in such a city, children, youth, and families sleep in the streets because no one offers them a place to stay. I can’t imagine how I ever could explain the situation to her.