It can be convenient to peg someone. Based on a single event or detail decide that we know the sum total of their personality. Their worth. If they are deserving of our time. Making a sweeping decision frees us from the responsibility to pay attention. To be curious. To come closer. 

I have done it.

Aside from being a riveting monologue, the TED Talk about the Equal Justice Initiative is a call to compassion. Bryan Stevenson tells the story of his grandmother, who was herself a daughter of slaves, and how she conveyed to each of her grandchildren that they were special. Lovable. Capable of great things. Mr. Stevenson is an attorney, representing children trapped by poverty in the deep south, being tried for crimes as adults.

One of the piercing truths he expressed is that a person who tells a lie is more than a liar. A boy who steals a car is greater than just a thief. A child who kills is not merely a murderer. Each of us is more than the lowest parts of ourselves, and if we resort to defining each other from those failings we blunder as well. Society loses too, in that the landscape of who we are as a people is measured by how we treat the least of those among us. The poor, the marginalized, the hurting, those who most need our clemency.