In the home where I grew up, there was a message displayed in cross stitching: "The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."  When I was about 14 years old and could take the Staten Island Ferry by myself into Manhattan, that number of things waiting to make me happy burgeoned, and I couldn't wait to see them all.

One day, I was walking up a broad avenue, tipsy on topaz sky and the bouquets of golden light bouncing off store windows, when I heard a man's voice call out to me, "Where you think you goin', girlie?"  I stopped and turned. He was sitting on a stoop, wearing a blue fedora and blue striped shirt.  "You heard me, chickie.  Where you think you goin'?"  Thinking was the farthest thing from my mind.  I was unaware that I was skipping along into the neighborhood called Harlem.  I pointed north and said, "That way."  He said, "No, you ain't.  You goin' back that way."

Any adolescent urban adventurer would bristle at such a command.  I looked into his glassy, bloodshot eyes.  Then I looked again.  The voice of intuition threaded its way through my innocent, enchanted brain, and I wheeled the Keds around and started walking back south.  The whiskey-soaked living angel had given me a gift of compassionate discrimination, and I accepted it.

It is certain that we are all surrounded by angels of divinity.  They envy the glory of human consciousness, even as they punch the time clock of divine protection.  I still walk crowded city streets and crunchy gravel roads, filling mental baskets with the happiness of an infinite number of people and things.  Angels keep me safe, and I lighten their workload by practicing the high art of discrimination.

The word criminal has come to be associated with illegality. But it derives from the broader concept of sin and refers to that which is wrongful, immoral, or harmful. Just as incriminating knowledge is used to assign guilt with all its implications, discriminating knowledge is used to identify and protect against inferior, wrongful, harmful elements. As a pure mental capacity, all discrimination is good in that it uses knowledge to differentiate between more or less worthy and safe choices.

 There are two forms of discrimination: objective and subjective.  Objective discrimination is differentiation of qualities in material alternatives based on special knowledge.  Objective discrimination is what connoisseurs and experts do.  One can have discriminating taste in art, music, or wine.  Subjective discrimination is objective knowledge wrapped in eternal and universal values.  It arises when the acquired knowledge of a curious and caring mind works for the promotion of lasting ideals and values, such as protection from harm.  In its highest degree, subjective discrimination involves intuition, which is the faculty of the heart.  Intuition, or the sixth sense, comes from the depth of the spirit being.  When the mother has an irresistible sense that something is not right about her child, or the detective has a hunch he has to follow, that is the purest, most spiritual state of subjective discrimination.

Discrimination is different from judgmentalism.  Judgmentalism occurs when an individual claims an unearned superiority of viewpoint and opinion over the one being judged.  Subjective discrimination does not necessarily imply a claim of superiority.  The old man on the stoop did not have to address issues of status when he recommended a different walking tour to a skinny white girl in pink Bermuda shorts.

Subjective discrimination is the polar opposite of prejudice or bigotry.  Prejudice is literally a prejudging, the utterances of a closed mind.  Bigotry is the worst degree of prejudice, a mind that has been shut hard by hate.  Discrimination results from the dynamic working of an open, informed, nimble mind applying knowledge and values to a novel situation.  Psychologists call this process cognitive restructuring.  Cognitive restructuring is the ability to reject automatic negative beliefs about self or others and to restructure beliefs around the full possibility of what is really there.

Prejudice and bigotry vitiate cognitive restructuring.  They amount to the mind losing that capacity and collapsing into automatic negative beliefs.  Discrimination is essentially applied cognitive restructuring.  It is the ability to apply reliable knowledge to new situations free of prejudice or bigotry in order to achieve a valued purpose.  The more closed the mind, the worse the prejudice.  The more open the mind, the greater the powers of subjective discrimination.

Subjective discrimination of harm helps all.  When a person is prevented from committing a crime due to discrimination, it protects him as well as his potential victims.

It is often assumed that someone who commits suicide must be insane.  That is not true.  Quite sane people kill themselves when they lose faith in God, confidence in themselves, and hope for the future.  The American people have been brainwashed to commit national suicide – to accept nullification of the Constitution, open borders, and the normalization of terrorism, and to give enormous aid to enemies like Iran, all due to relentless destruction of our faith and self-respect.  This has been accomplished by the globalist left, spearheaded by eager embalmers like Obama and Hillary Clinton, who equate vitally necessary subjective discrimination with the hissing "isms" of bigotry.  For example, President Obama applied a pinch of salt on the national wounds on 09/25/16 by saying white officers "[i]n fits and starts are struggling to understand discrimination."

This race-baiting ignores the fact that a significant plurality of police chiefs and officers are either Hispanic or less white than himself.  It singles out by race one group of officers supposedly having special trouble doing their job honorably.  A little more melanin, and police work becomes just a walk at the beach.  What the president really means is that white cops are racist, but he greases up his prejudice with misuse of the term discrimination.

The heart of police work is the vigilant subjective discrimination of harmfulness, used to protect people.  But to convince Americans that they are unworthy of protection and that they should relinquish their heritage of individual freedom to unnamed global overlords, Obama and his ilk batter us with the message that practicing subjective discrimination to protect ourselves against crime and terrorism constitutes racism.  Experience and intuition used to discriminate bad actors who would do harm to our families are the essence of compassion and sanity.

The man on the stoop profiled me.  He used that swift measure of things to protect me, but also to protect his community from an innocent interloper.  The gentleman in the crumpled fedora "saw something and said something."  The cynical America-wrecker, Jeh Johnson, hides behind that phrase even as his policies do nothing to stop illegal immigration.

Seeing something and doing something to protect from people from harm are the enactment of subjective discrimination based on profiling.  We are committing national suicide because our vilifiers have made us afraid to exercise our God-given faculty of discrimination.  Even the angels cannot protect a soul who is blind to danger.