During a recent trip to Chicago, I attended my 11-year-old nephew’s fifth-grade championship basketball game. The game was held in the gym of a Catholic high school on the Southwest side, a traditionally ethnic, white, working-class part of town that during my youth could not have been more different from the nearly all-black South Side neighborhood where I grew up. But as the Spanish-language billboards dotting Cicero Avenue on my drive west on a sunny Sunday morning suggested, the days of a white majority in that part of town have long since passed. Latinos and African Americans now made up a considerable and growing portion of the population.

That reality left me expecting something quite different from what I encountered inside the gym. My nephew attends a Catholic school. His team, the Warriors, was all white. The opposing team, the Bulldogs, came from a public school. Half of the boys on that team were white, half were black. This school, it appeared, had managed to achieve integration of a sort. The Warrior coach was white, the Bulldog coach was black. In the bleachers, parents arranged themselves in two ways: by team and by race. The Warrior parents, all of whom were white, clustered together. The Bulldog parents separated themselves into two groups—the black parents sat together in one part of the bleachers and the white parents sat together in another.

Sports events, with their taut dramatic arcs, often appear in films to illustrate the overcoming of adversity or the triumph of goodness. Of course it was unreasonable to expect catharsis at a real-life, fifth-grade basketball game. But the racial divide at this game was so overt, so concrete, that I could not help but wish for some small sign of a bridge being built, some hint of a deeper understanding of our human commonalities being expressed. I would like to say that by the end of the game I witnessed such a gesture – anything at all. Unfortunately I cannot. What I can say is that the boys themselves seemed focused solely on winning. They appeared as unconcerned about race as they were about who among them had shaved his head in anticipation of the big game.

The mood was strangely grim – to me anyway, unschooled as I am in the ruthlessness of organized youth sports. There were no cheerleaders, pep squad or music of any kind. There was no emcee to call the plays or remind everyone that this was meant to be a celebration of team effort and sportsmanship. This was not a festive, celebratory event. And forget about fun. There was no sense of occasion or purpose beyond what was happening in and around the key.

The Bulldogs took the lead early on, and the black parents were loud and appreciative, clapping and shouting and stomping on the bleachers in sync. This display clearly unsettled some of the white parents. One Warrior fan who was seated near a cluster of cheering black Bulldog parents got up and moved. Near the end of the first quarter another Warrior parent whispered, “I’m worried that there’s going to be a riot.”

By the second half, the Warriors were gaining. Parents and coaches shouted at the players, and the referees blew their whistles. The eleven-year-old boys shouldered the weight of all this adult pressure admirably, passing, dribbling and shooting their hearts out. Both teams were age-appropriately uneven, demonstrating at some moments remarkable skill and grace and at others collapsing in a heap like a litter of clumsy puppies.

For the Warriors, a third consecutive league championship was at stake. They were aiming for an unbroken record. At what cost?

My nephew was not the most gifted of players, but he was eager to do his part for the team. He was relegated to the bench for all but a precious few seconds of play. Some days earlier, in the final practice before the big game, the coach had arranged a scrimmage with some seventh-graders. But only the top players were permitted to participate. My nephew and the other second-stringers sat on the sidelines. The lesson the coach’s actions imparted was clear: team sports are not about playing for the joy of the game or to learn how to be a part of a team. They are about winning.

I wish I could say that in a grandly cinematic moment my nephew or some other second-stringer made a key play that forced the coach, the parents and the team to reflect on their preconceived notions of worth. But just as I can’t say I witnessed any glimmer of understanding between parents of different races, I can’t point to any teachable moment here either.

In the third quarter the Warriors took and kept the lead for the remainder of the game. Even before their game was completed the next two teams had arrived for their championship bout and were filing in, hovering at the edges of the court. The Warrior and Bulldog plaques and trophies were hastily distributed and the team photos quickly snapped. Any hint of ceremony was surrendered to an efficient use of the judges, referees and borrowed gym space. As we, the spectators of the Bulldog-Warrior game filed out, the horn signaling the start of the next game sounded. The court stretched right up to the base of the bleachers and a referee bore down on us, barking at us to “Get off the floor.”

I carried this experience with me for a few days, trying to make sense of it.There is no clear moral here, no easy opportunity for finger pointing. It was one of thousands of similarly alienating encounters occurring at that very moment in modern American life. On Tuesday, when I heard Barack Obama speak about our nation’s “racial stalemate” I began to understand what I had witnessed. Our inability to see one another clearly, to unite at every level, from community basketball games to the larger issues of our time, can be traced in part to this racial paralysis.

This section of his speech is especially resonant:

“Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’re worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come true at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

“Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation…

“Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.”

Here's a piece, on today's Opinion page in the LA Times, that I developed from an earlier blog entry on LA's annual tree slaughter. I first wrote about the environmentally destructive practice of topping in the LA Weekly in 2000.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an appreciation of Bernard Taper, whose Profiles course I took while at Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism and who celebrated his 90th birthday in February.

He had some thoughts on what I’d written, which I’m sharing here. These comments are compiled from two voicemail messages and a phone conversation:

There are a couple of things I’d say about the piece. First of all I wasn’t trying to show you that writing is hard, I was trying to show you that writing is demanding, which is different. It isn’t always hard. It can be very joyous. But it is demanding because one has to have a very good sense of what the piece is about.

You say that I was interested in good ideas and good writing. That’s not quite what I was doing, or what I think a good editor does, and it has nothing to do with whether you like the writer or not. The main thing I’m looking for as an editor is this: have you recognized all the possibilities of your subject, and have you done the best that could be done in bringing out all the issues or themes in your subject.

When I say writing is demanding I don’t mean that you shouldn’t enjoy yourself. I think when you get a sense of all the possibilities and the things you hadn’t expected when you first start working on a piece there can be a lot of joy, as there can be when you suddenly find yourself writing a very good sentence or when you find yourself asking just the right question that you hadn’t anticipated of the person you’re interviewing.

Many, many times while I was working on a piece I would say to myself, am I really getting paid to do this? There is so much pleasure in it.

I’m not crazy about Joan Didion’s statements. Whether or not an editor likes a writer has nothing to do with it. For example, I like Joan Didion’s writing, but I don’t particularly like her as a person. I’m not quite tuned into the whole question of whether you should like the writer or not.

A good relationship with an editor is one in which the editor tells you things which are useful -- if the editor makes suggestions which improve the work. My concept of editing is not the picky stuff about colons and semicolons. As an editor I want to know whether in your writing you have learned your subject, whether you have fulfilled what you needed to fulfill in order to write well about the subject.

Over the years when students would come to me and say how do you do this or that, how do you come to a point where you can write a piece the way you think it should be. I'd say live a long time.

With daylight savings fast approaching, let's take a moment to consider something else worth saving: our trees.

Each spring, tree hackers emerge from the woodwork, applying their chain saws to the limbs and branches of L.A.’s urban canopy and leaving us with thousands of hideously maimed trees-turned-coat racks.

The practice, known in urban forestry parlance as “topping,” is not merely unsightly. Perpetrators insist that topping reduces leaf litter and the risk of hazardous limb breakage, and that it clears away pesky branches that obscure billboards, canyon vistas and business signage.

But hacking off the tops of trees only makes things worse. Topped trees frantically sprout thousands of weakly attached limbs that once again block views and are more likely than ever to break and fall. Even worse, topping obliterates a tree’s ability to function normally. Healthy trees create oxygen, provide cooling shade and trap storm water runoff with their roots. In one year, a well-cared-for adult tree can absorb the amount of carbon produced by a car driven 26,000 miles. When the leaves and branches are hacked off, the tree shuts down, focusing all of its efforts on recovery. Topped trees are vulnerable to disease, infestation and early death.

So much for reducing our carbon footprint.

            The city of Los Angeles officially did away with the practice of topping nearly 20 years ago. But beware the man with chainsaw in hand. Recently a tree trimming crew from the Department of Water and Power arrived on my block, revved up and ready to cut back some Indian Laurels that had embraced the power lines a bit too tightly.

            “You’re only going to trim back the branches that are in the way, right?” I asked, in my best concerned citizen voice. The trimmer’s buddy slapped him on the back and laughed. “Well, let’s just say we don’t call him Freddy Krueger for nothin’.” The trimmer smiled and said, with a mixture of sheepishness and pride, “Some of these guys do so little you can’t even tell they’ve been there. I like to be able to see what I’ve done.”

            My pleading seemed to have swayed the team – they left the trees largely intact. Two trees saved, a million-plus to go.

            Last summer Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa launched his Million Trees LA initiative. The idea is to plant a million seedlings in city soil over the course of a decade. On paper the plan looks great. According to the mayor a million trees could eliminate more than 2 million pounds of air pollutants and trap more than 2 billion gallons of storm water, saving the city $10 million in energy costs and $23 million in air pollution cleanup. But what chance do these tender saplings have of survival in a town that is clueless about caring for the trees it already has?

              Before you instruct your mow-and-blow gardener to give your Sweetgum its annual flat-top, educate yourself about proper tree pruning. Better yet, hire a certified arborist who agrees to be as non-invasive as possible to do the job. Your trees, and your city, will thank you.

            When I sat down to write this piece I looked up an article I wrote for the LA Weekly eight years ago, thinking that there would be much to update. The sad truth is that the article is as timely as ever.

            Are you a tree hacker? Read the article and heal thyself.