The Act of Dis-labelling

I recently read a rather humorous posting on Facebook, in Thich Nhat Hanh's group of all places. It read something to the tune of "it doesn't matter whether others are mean a**holes...just be nice to everyone and let them be whatever they want to be." The interesting contradiction I found in this poster is that the person clings to the view that they are nice and the other person is not so nice. In this regard, it seems that this same nice person is bound to encounter the same difficulty over and over again, so long as they make such a discrimination between 'nice' and 'not nice'. I found that this poster was rather ironic, considering that it was posted in a forum related to Buddhism. I have since then began to wonder if perhaps the participants in the online forum may have misunderstood certain aspects of the teachings, and might be distorting it somehow to justify labelling others harshly. I think I will stick with my original interpretation that it is meant to be a kind of light humor!
  I always go back to the Chan view that everything is coming from the mind. What I think is happening 'outside of me' is actually a projection of mental activities, habits and energies. By the time I have labelled the other person as an 'other' (or a more offensive epithet), I have already gone quite a remove from the pure, undivided experience that constitutes that encounter. Is there such a thing as "a nice person" or a "not so nice" person? In fact, these kinds of things are only the result of a very long process of labelling and making decisions based on those labels. I have come to wonder if even non-practitioners could benefit, perhaps, from trying to remove these labels from their emotional vocabulary altogether, opting instead to stick to the phenomena and resulting sensations. For sure, we do this on retreats and during direct contemplation practice, but it seems equally helpful to remind ourselves of this idea in daily life practice. If there is a word that we use often to differentiate between ourselves and another person, what would it be like to refrain from using this word for a while?
   I have a nagging suspicion that the purpose of labelling people using harsh language is to drive a distance between oneself and unpleasant situations or encounters. It can be quite useful when the mind and body are overwhelmed, but what happens when these labels become the habitual way that a person tries to protect themselves from pain or uncertainty?