By the time you read this, I will have bitten my tongue dozens of times to keep from upsetting federal airport "screeners." I am flying to Anchorage to join three of my family members on an Alaskan cruise ship. To get there, I will have to be searched before boarding a plane in St. Louis, delayed in Salt Lake City while others are frisked, and, finally, I am alerted by the cruise company that my body and baggage will be searched again before I am allowed on board the ship.

I don't mind being searched. I've stopped taking a carry-on bag with me, and I carry nothing on my person that will ring a buzzer. I will approach my inquisitors with the fullest confidence that nothing about my body will incite envy, or for that matter, lust, from any of them. I will appear to them as completely compliant, while on the inside being mad as a hornet. However, no matter how much self-psychobabble I will have inflicted on my poor brain, in preparation for the loss of my freedom to use aggressive and purging speech in airports, I know that it will be a challenge to keep my "cool." Many times, I have had to stifle my urge to shout at appallingly officious airport screening Nazis, "Listen, you mouth breathing little thug, do I really fit the profile of a murderous Islamic savage? Do I smell and look like a camel jockey, and do I look like the type of person who could be enticed to murder myself for the promise of "seventy-two virgins?"

So far, I've kept my mouth shut, but I have found other ways to strike at my tormenters. I give them the "dumb, bumbling, old man" routine. If they ask me to take off my shoes before passing through "the eye of the needle," I take about 45 seconds per shoe to get them off, even though I routinely wear loafers when flying. Then, I just stand there, like a retarded old goat until they have ordered me at least twice to "go on thru!" Then, I very slowly replace my shoes. I give myself bonus points if I incite just one fellow traveler to groan with impatience. The "old geezer act," when it works well, satisfies my need for vengeance.

Occasionally, I am lucky enough to encounter a "racial profiling" screener, one who sees that I have no hand luggage, and that I am a portly, attractively balding, elderly Teutonic-American southern gentleman, and since we are not at war with Germany nor the South, the profiling screener reasonably zips me through the screening gate without delay, which brings us to the subject of this piece, "Racial Profiling."

Let's pretend that you are an FBI agent during the McCarthy era hunting down communists. If you had used racial profiling back then, you wouldn't have gone to New York City's Harlem to find communists. Harlem was a city unto itself, with black doctors, lawyers, dentists, wealthy businessmen, a solid black middle class, and a striving lower class. Harlem had no communists. The vast majority of its citizens were fiercely patriotic Americans. Using "racial profiling" as a tool for locating communist spies in Harlem would have yielded nothing. The communists in New York were in the universities and in "the arts," two areas where black folks weren't allowed.

If you were an agent sent to Philadelphia, Mississippi in the 60's to gather information that would help find, prosecute, and punish murdering members of the Ku Klux Klan, how effective do you think you'd be if the only people you suspected of being Klan members were black? The answer of course is that you would find no Klan members among the black citizens of Philadelphia, Mississippi. But, it would have been stupid to go to Mississippi looking for information that would destroy the Klan without using "racial profiling." The blacks weren't wearing sheets and murdering other blacks. The Mexicans and Chinese were not members of the Mississippi Klan. I ask you, from what race came the Ku Klux Klan? If your answer is "the white race," you are absolutely correct, and you have just used racial profiling to good advantage. Never mind that the elite media and Hollywood and the ACLU maintain that law enforcement should not be allowed to consider race at all, one must use profiling in investigations, it's inevitable. Investigative profiling involves the use of racial, economic, religious, political , and sometimes psychological, assessments, to name a few.

Today, if law enforcement were to look for Islamic terrorists among seventy-year-old blue-haired ladies, what do you think the success rate would be? Where could one look more successfully in finding Islamic terrorists? How about investigating Islamic males, especially Arabs in the United States, no matter how long they have lived here? Would that be "racial profiling?" Yes, and it‚s essential for law enforcement to create such a profile.

Consider this easily obtained information from the "public domain" of the Internet. Islamic savages blew up the U. S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 243 marines. It was Islamic terrorists who killed 270 innocent people in 1988 by bombing Pan Am Flight 103. Islamic terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and Islamic terrorists bombed the U. S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1995, killing 292 innocents. Islamic terrorists bombed American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1997, killing 242, and maiming 5,000. Islamic terrorists bombed the USS Cole in 2000, killing seventeen sailors, and we remember what happened on September 11, 2001 to the World Trade Center.

Finally, we must chose commonsense over "political correctness" if we are to survive, and that means that "profiling" is here to stay.

Kenneth Kinchen is an independent writer with a background in international business and foreign service contracting.