Reality or Catastrophism

These days it seems it would be so easy to start a panic that would accelerate the failing global financial system.  Why don't we?  Because we don't know what's going to happen afterward.  It is naive to think that this current crisis will remain confined to Wall Street.  If it spreads and hits everyday people hard, as it did in the 1930s, will everyday people be ready?  Everyone has their own dystopian nightmare, but how many of us have thought about what we would actually do amidst an accelerating breakdown of "the economy"?  If money loses value, if people lose jobs, if neighbors get hostile?  We can only hope that desperation leads to organization and humanism - but this is the United States, where individualism has long reigned and racial antagonism seems to be more the rule than the exception.  Not to mention how many fools are armed, including the police.  Today I imagined myself in front of Rainbow Grocery as the mobs approached...but before the whole place is looted, someone finds the produce buyer, who is persuaded to contact food producers to arrange distribution...the food producers are simultaneously faced with the demands of their own recently-fired workers, who offer to continue running operations as a collective in exchange for enough food to live on, and meanwhile, some organized truckers have sent a representative to the markets to arrange transport...gas station owners are persuaded to fill up tanks for the transport of basic needs until the gas runs out, but luckily refinery workers are thinking ahead and arranging fuel delivery for cooperating gas stations...bike store owners offer bicycles in exchange for promised deliveries of food and medicine to hospitals...urban emigration committees are organized to arrange an exodus to surrounding farmland, emigrants bring building materials for local housing needs....

Anyway, you get the drift.   If conditions get urgent, and ideas and energy and diplomacy are needed, where will you be? What will you do?