God Have Mercy on Us All

We're so close in time to the Paris attacks, yet I already see Internet memes criticizing people for how they express their sympathies (the essence of some of these memes appears to be "I refuse to join the pray for Paris bandwagon when [this other cause] receives almost no attention" or their more enlightened cousin, "While you may pray for Paris, I will pray not only for Paris but for X").  The Beirut attacks, because of their similarity to the one in Paris, seem especially vulnerable to being trotted out this way, as evidence of the limitations of the compassion that is being extended to the victims in Paris and to their bereaved.

I understand the substance of the critique--that the shock with which we Americans greet the Paris attacks and the attention we offer to those losses is shaped by biases for those who look like or live like we do.  It's certainly true that one of the great tasks of being human is to see beyond those things, to extend our sympathies to those who are different, and that we aren't doing so well on that front.  

And yet something about this discourse just seems wrong to me; it seems the opposite of compassionate to belabor the insufficiency and incompleteness of another person's sympathy rather than seeking to nurture that compassion.  The declaration I'm objecting to (and I want to be clear that I'm not talking about people who sincerely are extending their own sympathy to those grieving in Beirut or elsewhere) often seem to harbor a sense of superiority on the part of the critic, who is so certain that his or her compassion is more virtuous, more wise, than that of the person who only has only expressed sympathy for this one tragedy.  But look: every human life is infinite in value, its loss worth infinite sorrow.  120 Parisians, 45 Lebanese, 3 million small children who will die of hunger this year.  Even imperfect and incomplete compassion is a start, and whose is sufficient, anyway?