Yes...but.

I remember stories from the Depression of housewives sharing food with hobos, and hobos polite enough to ask for a meal and sit out back to eat it (and I don't mean because they weren't worthy of eating at the table, but it's just not always safe to invite strangers in - especially for a housewife at home while perhaps her husband was at work).

I'm all for raising people up, and language is a start. Treating people as we'd want to be treated in their circumstances - with the awareness, as my grandparents would have said, that "there but by the grace of God, go I" is important, too, lest language be mere lip-service. If language can encourage empathy, and I think perhaps it CAN, then we should work on that intentionally. I used to think, though, that we didn't need "political correctness" so much as we needed to have basic good manners and kindness drilled into us, repeatedly, from childhood. "PC" would truly have been as redundant as I thought it ought to be.