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I played in an elementary school basketball tournament once that taught me a sobering lesson in life. It remains one of my most vivid "What the . . .?" moments ever and retains the power to astonish me, more than 40 years later.

I think it was during third grade - at St. Angela Hall, a Roman Catholic school in Brooklyn, N.Y., which I got to by riding in decrepit, World War II-era city buses. In any case, the boys from two co-ed classes - it was pre-feminism - were competing for ribbons, in the days before they gave awards to everybody, win or lose.

The good nuns decided, for the sake of efficiency, to let every boy in both classes play - meaning there were 15 or so per side. But it was full-court, so there was plenty of room, theoretically, for us little people to spread out. The game apparently was planned on the spur of the moment, so we didn't have our gym clothes. We played in our school uniforms, sans jackets and shoes. One team distinguished itself from the other by keeping on its ties, embroidered with the school's logo.

Remember, first of all, that this was a Catholic institution, whose pupils were drilled in respect for God's law and Caesar's order. Understand, too, that I commuted to school from a neighborhood where basketball was considered God's greatest sport, and my Õhood-mates and I already had a lot of experience with organized play at the local St. James Pro-Cathedral parish hall and in nearby playground pickup games.

Nevertheless, from the tourney's opening tip onward, participants played like a single pack of wolves, each contending for the same slab of venison.

I think there was some attempt at refereeing by the nuns, but we mostly were left on our honor, such as it was. For a few, brief seconds, I and a couple of other players struggled to employ such fundamentals as dribbling and passing to our own teammates. It wasn't easy to dribble, however, when one was mobbed and mauled by 29 kids intent on stripping the orb, leaving no space on the court to bounce a ball. When one managed to pass - or, rather, heave the ball somewhere, anywhere, else - the entire mob followed.

One of the better players quickly figured out that to have any chance at scoring, he needed to lock the ball under his arm and run for open space, stiff-arming opponents out of the way. After seeing this, pretty much everybody gave up on playing by the rules. Only two or three baskets were made during the whole game.

I felt bad that our team lost but worse when a couple of alpha males got ribbons for sportsmanship, and I, who dribbled, didn't.

This kind of mob behavior is common among children. I know so from coaching girls' soccer for several years when my daughters were younger. (The girls, by the way, got squared away a lot more quickly than my grammar-schoolmates.)

Mob behavior is part of human nature, I guess. What scares me, though, is how close to the surface the same kind of behavior is in adults, who should have better self-control. It takes discipline to be the only one who keeps his place in line, when everybody else is taking cuts - in traffic, at self-check-out counters in grocery stores, in political campaigns that go negative, in looting undefended businesses and so on.

Obviously, the nuns could have done better at setting the game up, training pupils and controlling the insanity. Nuns - and Americans as a whole - normally are pretty good at doing that.

But anyone who takes for granted that Americans are immune to behaviors in the news this week - such as the political riots in Kenya and Pakistan; bombings in Iraq, Sri Lanka and Algeria; continuing genocide in Darfur - needs to reflect carefully and deeply on their own, their nation's and their species' history.