http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/
Add to that imagery hordes of hungry, thirsty refugees looking for something of yours with which to fill their bellies; by any means necessary.
And be reminded that the hungry, thirsty hordes will be really wasteful and destructive, trashing everything they do not need at that instant, and moving on to the next place. So in a very short time, nobody will have anything.
I am less certain of an acute crisis as opposed to a protracted, annoying one. There are some good reasons for this.
Even during the Great Depression, after years of the Dust Bowl had wiped out thousands of farms from Texas into Canada, there was still such an excess of food in America that food prices were very depressed. Wheat was 50 cents a bushel and corn was being burned for fuel.
At the same time, many people were starving. One of Roosevelt’s first effective, if very authoritarian acts, was the creation of the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation (FSRC). It was tasked both with destroying vast amounts of food, and redistributing food to the starving.
One of its first acts was to seize and slaughter over six million pigs from private owners, in the very decentralized pig market. Once killed they were just buried. Then the FSRC continued throughout the agricultural system in a campaign of destruction, to force food prices to rise.
Today, American agribusiness is still heavily controlled, mostly to prevent excess production, yet each year the government spends billions of dollars just to warehouse the excess food until it rots.
So food scarcity is not a problem, even in a severe economic crisis.
And because of malfeasance, there is nationally an overabundance of housing as well. Much of which could be easily taken over by the government as debt relief to banks, then redistributed to the homeless, hopefully under some condition in which they could earn equity, and thus would have incentive to maintain what could become their property.
This handles the two critical things. From that point, a wise government would need to renege on the nonsensical promises to the future of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and other such largesse. Then to either start paying off its existing debt, or just renege it as well.
The federal government would be unable, or unwilling to do this, but it could be done to them, and for them, by the States, seeking to end the economic crisis with a constitutional convention.
Thus, the pain inflicted on the public would be minimized, the recovery would be faster, and America would not fall into deprivation and despair as it did before.