Henry Winkler Ripped for Saying Cataclysmic Event Needed to Heal World

Henry Winkler thinks the world needs to go through a "cataclysmic event" to help bring people together since we're so dang divided -- but his idea is getting a big fat ... HUH?!?

The actor tweeted out the controversial sentiment Sunday, seemingly out of nowhere and without much context. He wrote ... "We are So divided as a country .. only a cataclysmic Event , that makes us depend on one another again , can bring us back together."

Like we said ... not a whole lot of info here to get a sense of what Henry's talking about exactly -- but it could be anything ... frankly, we ARE quite divided these days -- from politics to just about everything else.

With that said ... his call for a big boom moment is being called insensitive, tone-deaf and weirdly out of touch -- especially since we, you know, just went through (and are still going through) a worldwide pandemic ... which you would think fits HW's criteria for this.

People obviously pointed this out to Henry, and he received the message ... but responded somewhat cryptically, writing ... "The Pandemic pushed the world inside creating a world apart." What we think he's saying is ... this pandemic isn't the catastrophe he had in mind -- if anything, he seems to believe COVID has only pushed us further apart.