The world is out of control! Most governments are helpless. Billions are helpless, hungry and suffering.

Mother nature is angry. Earth displays its anger in the nature of climate change, causing hurricanes, forest fires, flooding, freezing storms, arctic icecaps melting, drought and volcanic eruptions. All of a sudden we have the spread of a viral pandemic that is killing millions of people and disrupting life as we lived it. It is appropriate to say that the 'wrath of earth' is displaying its displeasure with how Homo sapiens have been behaving.

The coronavirus has exposed our weaknesses in all walks of life. Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has created both a public health crisis and an economic crisis in the United States. The pandemic has disrupted lives, pushed the hospital system to its capacity, and created a global economic slowdown.

World trade and economies are in a crisis. India's health care system is broken and unable to take care of its millions of COVID-19 patients. Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina, the economic engines of the past in South America, have been crippled by the pandemic. Central American countries, especially Guatemala and Honduras, are in chaos. Africa is struggling. Japan's economy is trying to find it's identity. China is holding on to its power and expanding. Europe as a union is breaking up. And democracy in United States, the most stable economy in the past century, is now in a slow decline with wall street instability.

Everything that seemed to work before the pandemic is broken.

The world economy has rapidly changed from sovereign countries doing it alone in trade, technology and manufacturing of goods to being displaced by globalization. Globalization was slowly taking place with America outsourcing labor intensive manufacturing jobs to third world countries. The evolution of computers, the internet and technology connected the world together and further perpetuated globalization. But the spark that ignited a fire in world global trade and economics is the uncontrolled pandemic.

Most, if not all, world problems have been caused by politicians; although this observation will been denied.  Government leaders have been making many decisions that are bad for the general public but good for them. World leaders have behaved like little selfish kids fighting on the school playground. So we have lack of cooperation in fixing world problems and chaos.

This assessment of life on earth is a short version.

The pandemic has uncovered the flaws in how we live:

• Economy: GDP is the sum of consumption (C), investment (I), and government (G) expenditures in a closed (no goods in or out) economy. Basically, GNP summarizes how big a country economy is and compares it to other countries. United States and China are the largest economies in the world. The problem is that the poor and middle class don’t have enough money. Economic growth since the late 1970s has been slow and inequitably distributed, largely as a result of poor policy choices. Government has been spending more money than it takes in as taxes ,causing a budget imbalance. Most Americans having less than $400 savings for a rainy day are in financial trouble! The median family has a lot of debt. In summary, the USA economy is bad.
  
• Shifting economy: Displacement of dirty fossil fuel to cleaner electric technology. This causes the need for laid-off workers to retool for high-skilled jobs to avoid unemployment. USA has a free market that does not cater to the middle and lower classes.
  
• Food: Up until 2020, the world food supply was the rich countries as "Have it" and poor countries as "Have Nots." Now, many living in a rich country like United States are starving and making poor dietary choices that lower their immune systems.
  
• Health care systems: Most countries provide a single universal health care system while United States has many competitive for profit health care systems that are not delivering adequate preventive disease services. Both systems were not prepared to deal with a viral pandemic.
  
• Shifting infections & diseases: Communicable diseases before 1950 were displaced by incubating chronic diseases and now viral diseases. Medical doctors have not been able to adjust to the new tends.
  
• Jobs & work: Prior to 1980, most of manufacturing jobs were manual labor. Manufacturing jobs disappeared  with outsourcing and were replaced by service jobs. But outsourcing many manufacturing jobs to third world countries gave rise to robots that further displaced manual labor. The consequences are people with low education and low-work skills finding low paying jobs and having difficulty living on low wages.
  

The world has not addressed the problems of how to provide work for those with a low education and low job-skills, population control and how to feed the billions of people.

We, humans, seem to have lost our common sense and wisdom! The wellbeing of billions is now endangered by an unstable food supply, broken health care systems and economic job insecurity. The mind-set of modern man as the all mighty ruler of the world has to change, and consider sharing his place on earth with all the other living things that make earth their home.

This is a sad commentary on the state of the world today. In spite of a trend toward globalization, the World Health Organization lacks power to fix the pandemic and health problems. It can only make recommendations. But mother earth is not very forgiving and appears to be slowly forcing us to change our ways and behave.