Dear Sir,

Watching the tragic hordes of refugees fleeing from despotic governments and pouring over crowded borders is an eerie experience of total shock for me to watch.

They look like cattle and probably feel like cattle. No food, no water, no sanitation and ensuing disease. A huge gamble to find a better life and to be willing to die trying is the message of desperation and courage.

Where are we on this so-called journey of civilisation? This road travelled over centuries, flooding humans, hopefully trying to turn away from barbarism and towards enlightenment and social development in the world?

Have we not understood that to persist through the ages we must look after each other; otherwise, it would be dog eat dog.

We hear all too often now, “Not my problem.”

Really? It used to be that neighbours would gather together and look after each other in times of trouble. Do we? Should we? Of course, we should.

We watch in horror to see millions of people, families with children, trying to escape the terror, torture, corruption and famine that they have endured for years under cruel and corrupt governments.

We seem numb with disbelief, slow to respond as we have not seen this before in all its stark reality. But we will awaken hopefully to the massive humanitarian effort that we, the world, must now make to first take in these masses to avert a tragedy of such proportions that it would be like culling the human race. And it has just begun. Human beings changing the maps of the world, leaving their birthplace to find another safe place to live with their families.

With all our resources and abundance, we should mount a massive worldwide drive to drop food and water to those exposed out in the open until all have been sheltered. Set up with The Red Cross or whoever could be made responsible for posts all over the world, collecting donations of money, food and clothing, however small, to be assembled and distributed to a responsible huge holding base in each country.

To punish Syria would be to punish its many innocent people, but we should make sure that we remove the evil that dwells within their borders and their sympathisers. Otherwise, they will grow again and prosper like a cancer. We owe it to the next generation with the full co-operation of the world to do a radical resection of that evil once and for all.

If we do not make this effort to help this tragic flood of humanity, we could provoke and find out what a revolution of angry, starving people can do all over Europe.

History repeating itself? I realise that technology and the population explosion have perhaps dulled our morality, but we are surely on a dangerous path — without compassion for our fellow man.

For the world collectively is full of good things, money, food, clothing and caring.

So much thrown away to help the rapid, economic race to move along profitably, and waste and destroy so we have to buy more again and again, while refugees are expendable, dying on the roadsides and washed up on the beaches like garbage.

We must all listen, we must all care and be our brother’s keeper. Not next week, not tomorrow, but now, today, in Bermuda.

I am too old to organise, but I will help all I can.

DIANA WILLIAMS