A succession of recent tragedies cannot help but bring to mind another summer 75 years past when, as the poet said, “waves of anger and fear” spread around the world and “the unmentionable odour of death offends the September night.”

In the Near East beheadings are staged for the cameras. It is barbarism as political theatre, violence as viral marketing. These atrocities are fully intended to provoke a hot-blooded response and draw the West into the intractable tribal antagonisms of Mesopatamia for the third time in the last century. Like the plot which resulted in a burning and ruined New York skyline in 2001, these are made-for-TV outrages albeit on a smaller and thus more intimate scale. A horrified but mesmerised global audience cannot turn away from what it is witnessing. Cries for revenge and nothing but revenge fill the corridors of power and the media. And the impresarios responsible for staging this scripted mayhem gleefully anticipate iron-fisted Western intervention, knowing it will only further radicalise an already radicalised and destabilised region.

In the permanently besieged coastal ghetto which is Gaza, Israeli forces unleash obscenely disproportionate military responses against an elusive guerrilla enemy purposely sheltering in civilian enclaves. Thousands of non-combatants, including women and children, are killed. The already dilapidated Gazan infrastructure is further compromised. Disease, water shortages and hunger inflict more misery. But the two most conspicuous casualties are, of course, Palestinian moderation and the already enfeebled prospect of a two-state solution to a decades-old conflict over a twice-promised land.

In Europe both Jewish and Muslim communities have become the designated scapegoats for cruelties inflicted half a world away by an obdurate Israeli Prime Minister and fanatical jihadists. Ancient anti-Semitism and Islamophobia of an altogether more recent vintage are both resurgent. And Europe’s political and civic leaders, by and large, seem more inclined to quietly indulge these outpourings of populist bigotry rather than risk antagonising their voting bases by challenging them.

Meanwhile the old Russian fear of encirclement is manifesting itself anew in a crazed military adventure in the Ukraine. Cities are being shelled, long-established communities are being uprooted and displaced and civilian airliners are being blasted out of the skies by paranoid, trigger-happy militia men equipped with sophisticated surface-to-air missiles.

In Africa thousands are being scythed down by pestilence, war and famine. Closer to home US policemen who are sworn to protect and serve their communities are too often acting like refugees from South American death squads, indiscriminately shedding innocent blood.

In a world growing increasingly connected yet ever more detached, we in Bermuda frequently watch the horrors unfolding around us on our phones, laptops and various other gizmos with a sense of impotent rage. We bemoan the international community’s deplorable lack of empathy in the comments sections of social media and sign online petitions protesting all manner of global injustices.

Yet our activism is largely restricted to participation in online forums, often focusing on events we can never hope to influence taking place in countries we will never set foot in. Although in one sense the internet eliminates distance, in another it produces a curious distancing effect between us and our own community. Increasingly we turn a wilfully blind eye to Bermuda’s everyday tragedies and traumas even while championing worthwhile causes which are utterly remote from our own lives and experience.

Here in Bermuda, for example, the sole refuge for battered and abused women and their children, run by the Centre Against Abuse, has closed its doors due to lack of funds.

And — in a country with one of the highest GDPs in the world — shops and gas stations have Coalition for the Protection of Children collection boxes on their counters to ensure youngsters don’t go hungry at school.

Meanwhile, the ever-increasing ranks of the homeless mean more people sleeping in parks and on the streets because of overstressed and inadequate emergency accommodation.

And the infrastructure and environment creaks and groans in an Island still too dedicated to the short-term and short-sighted pursuit of profitability over sustainability.

As Scotland prepares to go to the polls in a historic referendum on independence tomorrow, a Scottish saying — “We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns” (“We’re all Jock Tampson’s children” or “We’re all the same under the skin”) — might be appropriate.

Bermuda might not be able to change the world — but we could try and start to. Right here. We can actually begin changing our tiny corner of this vast, indifferent world by changing the way we look after our Island and one another. For as Auden said in his celebrated poem marking the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, ultimately we have no choice — “we must love one another or die.”