I’m a New Yorker. Not an Upstate New Yorker: I was born and bred in Queens, spent most of my time in Brooklyn, and enjoyed hanging out in Manhattan. I remember 42nd Street when it was a whole mess seedier and you’d get off the train holding your camera close to your body and under your coat. I remember coming back from trips out of state and smiling whenever I saw the Twin Towers on the horizon. I actually enjoy Dirty Water Dogs…they’re a guilty pleasure. I’m totally proud of our Pizza, even after having had a slice in Chicago.

I’m also Hispanic. Not the white looking Ricky Martin type. I’m one of the dark ones that don’t look Hispanic at all. My expression, on a regular day, has the somber visage of a person who isn’t happy—even if I’m completely content. It’s not that I have a cloud over my head; it’s just that I’m one of those ugly people.

This means I have a history of being watched. When I would shop at a fruit stand in Brooklyn, I’d have the Koreans looking at me, their eyes following me about the store. When I would shop at a Macy’s, I’d have the white assistant managers looking at me, following me about the store. When I walked into a book store, I’d have the Guyanese store owners looking at me, following me about the store. If I dared pick up a magazine I received the patented “this is not a library” mandate.

Yeah it was annoying but I dealt with it. I didn’t rob these people but they’ve had a history with dealing with problems with a certain looking character.

Any New Yorker, when being honest, would tell you that if they saw a crowd of dudes of a certain color and puffy coats, they walked more circumspectly: their senses became more aware. I don’t think this was being racist even if it was profiling. Heck, I did it with my own people; since I don’t look Hispanic I knew that I could be a target.

Want to take moral high-ground? I’ll meet you at Marcy Ave at night or at just about any stop of the G-Train.

I even profiled by sex. All men is dangerous, especially if they’re under a certain age. If it was a mixed crowd, the danger level went down. If the girls in the crowd were louder, more ganster, the danger level went back up.

This sort of thing didn’t fail me as a New Yorker, on the street. It saved me from quite a few beatings.

So what’s wrong with doing this at the national level? I’m talking about intrinsic wrongness. Is it really an evil to have as part of a profile certain characteristics of a group that has a history doing a certain thing? Even if the group is starting to transcend normal descriptive factors, is there an intrinsic evil in using that as a starting point? I’m not going to bother making this a logical argument, I’m just asking that rhetorically and presenting all of this anecdotally.

I wasn’t in the City on 9/11. I worked in Long Island by then. I, like every New Yorker, was afraid. I didn’t know what was going on. Honestly, I thought that this was it: we were going to bomb the hell out of someone in a volatile region and have a break out of another world war. Come to think of it, my kid has been alive 8 years and almost every day of his life the US has been at war, so maybe I wasn’t that far off.

But I had friends in the City, then. A friend, at a small downtown hospital, saw the plane that crashed into the tower fly low overhead. Several friends felt the tremor and the boom of the impact. A friend of mine lost her husband and she was left with two kids. Another friend of mine stood outside of the towers and saw the people leaping to their death—an image that he’ll never forget. Another friend just missed being in the towers because he was running late for work. Another friend lost every co-worker. Family joined the exodus of people that evacuated the city.

I remember the smell. New Yorkers, me included, days after the Fall of the Towers, would exit our homes or apartments and wonder what that smell was. It was this sort of iodine, chemical sort of thing with a dash of, I don’t know—but I remember it. We complained about it without mentioning what it we thought it was.

It’s not surprising then when I talk to fellow New Yorkers, in private and from both sides of the political line, that they sometimes admit that when taking the subway, they’re nervous and sometimes they look at someone, maybe someone that looks middle-eastern—someone that might even look like me even if they’re Hispanic—and get worried. What’s in that big bag, they wonder to themselves, what’s in that bag?

The guy who set off the bomb that failed in 42nd Street was a Pakistani turned Citizen last year who, based on camera footage, looked like an older white guy. The T-Shirt vendor who pointed out the smoking bomb to a mounted police officer was an immigrant, with features more obviously those that we look at nervously. Indeed, a year and a half after 9/11 my entire family, including my son then coming on two, were scanned at the airport. There he stood, weeping, because he was being scanned. I was angry but I understood. Indeed, every time I go through airport security I am “randomly” checked. It’s annoying but I understand.

We don’t know what a terrorist looks like, but we need to be watching.

United States benefits a bit from geography and her neighbors. We’re surrounded by ocean instead of rivers; we’re covered by international flight checks instead of merely regional checks; Canadians have good background checking on immigrants while Mexicans shoot them; and we thus have the comfort and security to complain. Machine guns in the airport scare us, baggage checks take too long, racial profiling is racist, stupid racist righties are making a mountain out of a molehill, stupid leftists just want to let every terrorist in; while places like Israel, India and Mexico have no problem employing tough (sometimes admittedly evil) measures to protect their people.

No, I’m not saying that might makes right. I’m saying that the government has a responsibility to be extra careful and I can’t see how stopping security from doing what people normally do—watch, be aware, notice patterns—is the right way to go about things. What’s wrong with using one’s eyes? Maybe this isn’t a popular opinion especially since I (and people who look like me) will continue getting checked at security or followed by wary eyes but that’s just the cost of security in this current world.

Also, in a sort of roundabout way, people who try to ignore 9/11 (and common sense) to gain some political mileage are really doing more damage than any form of good. You want to use this to slam the right as being racist and what will you have in it’s place? Seriously, what other options do you have to offer? Get rid of Guns? This dude had propane. So please, quit it.

Addendum: I’m not saying that we should start trampling the Constitution in the name of Security.