Dignity is not something we earn. It is something we recognize in one another.
This is the foundation of every humanitarian effort — and every meaningful conversation. When we strip the word “dignity” of its bureaucratic clothing, what remains is the simple, stubborn refusal to look at any human being as less than ourselves.
The poor in spirit, the lonely, the imprisoned, the loud, the strange — they are not problems to be solved. They are people to be seen.
And in seeing them, we recover something of ourselves.