When The Music Stops – How America’s Cities May Explode In Violence, by Matt Bracken

This type of scenario seems highly likely in the not-too-distant future. From Matt Bracken at theprepperjournal.com:

Editors Note: I came across this fascinating essay from Matt Bracken that made the rounds about a year ago. In it, he paints a dire potential future that some others have imagined. In his thought-provoking article, Matt discusses how large cities may disintegrate and how citizens who are unable to rely on police forces could take matters into their own hands. Personally, I hope this is all conjecture, but Matt has a lot of history backing his theories up. We have seen these same types of situations before and there is no reason to assume that America is immune from humanity doing what it has been shown to do in the past. To paraphrase Gerald Celente, “When people have nothing left to lose, they lose it”.

In response to recent articles in mainstream military journals discussing the use of the U.S. Army to quell insurrections on American soil, I offer an alternate vision of the future. Instead of a small town in the South as the flash point, picture instead a score of U.S. cities in the thrall of riots greater than those experienced in Los Angeles in 1965 (Watts), multiple cities in 1968 (MLK assassination), and Los Angeles again in 1992 (Rodney King). New Yorkers can imagine the 1977 blackout looting or the 1991 Crown Heights disturbance. In fact, the proximate spark of the next round of major riots in America could be any from a long list cribbed from our history.

We have seen them all before, and we shall see them all again as history rhymes along regardless of the century or the generation of humankind nominally in control of events. But the next time we are visited by widespread, large-scale urban riots, a dangerous new escalation may be triggered by a fresh vulnerability: It’s estimated that the average American home has less than two weeks of food on hand. In poor minority areas, it may be much less. What if a cascading economic crisis, even a temporary one, leads to millions of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards flashing nothing but ERROR? This could also be the result of deliberate sabotage by hackers, or other technical system failures. Alternatively, the government might pump endless digits into the cards in a hopeless attempt to outpace future hyperinflation. The government can order the supermarkets to honor the cards, and it can even set price controls, but history’s verdict is clear: If suppliers are paid only with worthless scrip or blinking digits, the food will stop.

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