December 27, 2020
GREATER HOUSTON EDITION
Vol. 25, Issue 49
“Our vote and our money are the two most powerful things we have. Be careful who you give them to.” “Addressing Current & Historical Realties Affecting Our Community”
- Roy Douglas Malonson
SIX ELEMENTS THAT CONTROL THE WORLD By: Roy Douglas Malonson
HOUSTON -- Whether you believe the pandemic is a “sign of the times” that either the Bible, Koran or Nostradamus predicted, the shakeup felt by all has rocked the Earth to its epicenter. Many are scratching their heads and cursing the ground we are walking upon asking “why,” while others are falling to their knees praying for a better tomorrow and a solution. People are poor, sick, unemployed and desperate, and it appears that conditions, like spirits, are declining every day. To better grasp what’s currently going on, you should understand there are six elements that control the world, and the domino effect of occur-
rences that can happen when they’re disturbed. What are the elements? Health, economy, politics, religion, education and the media. To illustrate these principals, we show the effects of the disturbance of the elements in relation to the current global health crisis. HEALTH COVID-19 shut down America’s everyday operations when in March, governors and other elected officials scrambled to implement statewide guidelines to protect its residents from what was then a novel (new) virus. Horrifying scenes were playing out in emergency rooms across the globe with an overflow of people dying in hallways, packed ICU beds and bodies being stacked in big rigs to be hauled off to morgues. The virus
was swift and deadly, with African Americans being hit hardest and dying at disproportionately higher rates, primarily due to congested inner-city or impoverished conditions and lack of health care. President Donald Trump downplayed the virus, mocked the Chinese he blamed as the source of it, attacked reporters during press conferences who dared to question his plans on handling it, and told Americans that masks were for the weak. All along, he withheld the fact that he knew months before the general public that the deadly virus had reached America, a revelation that was made public in an interview with veteran journalist Bob Woodward. That withholding of information could have possibly contributed to the more than 300,000
deaths in America, to date, with more than 25,000 of them in Texas. ECONOMY Sick people can’t work, and dead folks can’t pay bills. And likewise, when a highly contagious, airborne disease is plaguing the globe, businesses must shutter their doors. According to reports, the COVID-19 pandemic and associated closures created a crisis for all workers, but the impact was greater for women, Blacks and Hispanics, lower-wage earners, and those with less education. In December 2019, women held more nonfarm payroll jobs than men for the first time during a period of job growth, but by May 2020, that was all reversed, due in part to job losses in the restaurant, leisure and hospitality industry, where women account for 53 percent of
workers. Meanwhile, President Trump spent his days challenging Centers for Disease Control experts and the advice of his own Coronavirus Task Force, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, on mask mandates and social distancing guidelines while holding campaign rallies with people packed in public venues, which leads us to our next element. POLITICS There is evidence that the pandemic affected public approval of leaders around the world, depending on how those leaders responded to the virus. Due to their swift action, government approval ratings rose in Italy, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. And in the U.S., state governors like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, and Gover-
nor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan saw an increase in approval ratings, but President Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus ultimately cost him re-election. To many, it appeared Trump was out for his own self-interests, rather than the protection of the people. And it’s not like he hadn’t been warned beforehand. During a 2014 speech, then-President Barack Obama warned about the need for the U.S. to cast aside partisan differences to prepare for an upcoming pandemic. “We have to put in place an infrastructure, not just at home but also globally. That allows us to see it quickly, isolate it quickly, respond to it quickly,” he
Elements cont’d page 2