NO SIREN FOR ME: On Emergency, Legitimacy, and the Breaking of the Social Contract

There are sirens for heart attacks. There are sirens for house fires. There are sirens for car wrecks on the freeway. There are no sirens for a life collapsing in slow motion.

That is what I have learned.

I used to believe—deeply, almost religiously—in the social contract. If you work hard. If you perform. If you contribute. If you mother well. If you follow the rules. If you excel. If you endure. Then when something truly catastrophic happens, the system responds.

Not generously. Not tenderly. But functionally.

Now I understand that this is not guaranteed. A woman can live in a state of continuous emergency and the world will step around her. A mother can say, over and over, “This is not survivable,” and nothing mobilizes. A high performer can build, produce, create—and when she is destabilized or endangered, the machinery designed to protect “citizens” can remain inert.

There is no rapid response unit for social annihilation. There is no flashing truck for being systematically disbelieved. There is no siren for chronic destabilization.

When I see a fire truck now—lights tearing red across the sky—I don’t feel reassured. My first thought is not sympathy. It’s this: Ah. Some white man is in trouble.

That is the reflex. Not because I know who called 911. Not because I have statistics about who receives emergency response. But because my lived experience has trained me to associate urgency with certain bodies—and indifference with mine.

When you call for help and nothing moves, repeatedly, your brain builds a model of the world. When you say, “This is an emergency,” and the answer is silence, your mind begins looking for patterns. Who qualifies? Who gets believed? Whose crisis is legible the moment it appears?

Eventually, the image that forms is specific. That image may be imperfect. It may be shaped by anger. It may be shaped by limited vantage. But it does not come from nowhere. It comes from accumulated non-response. This is how corrosion begins. Not with ideology. Not with hatred. With pattern recognition—accurate or not—born of exclusion.

The danger is not that I have that thought. The danger is that enough citizens begin to develop their own version of it. Because once people start believing that urgency flows along identity lines, the shared belief in equal protection dissolves. And that belief is the glue.

Emergency systems are built for spectacle. They are calibrated to flames, gunshots, cardiac arrest, active threat. They respond to visible spikes. They are not calibrated for slow destruction. They are not calibrated for reputational dismantling. They are not calibrated for prolonged psychological siege.

If your crisis is chronic, you never make it onto the gurney. You live in permanent triage—but you are never acute enough to count. And when you realize that no threshold of suffering you can articulate will trigger institutional urgency, something foundational shifts.

Trust erodes first. You stop believing in neutrality. You stop believing in equal protection. You stop believing that urgency flows according to need. Once that belief cracks, civic identity cracks with it.

There is another thought—more dangerous than anger. No taxation without representation. That is not a slogan. It is a founding doctrine. The American experiment rests on reciprocity. Citizens fund the state. The state protects the citizens. That is the bargain. Protection in exchange for contribution. Representation in exchange for compliance.

If women begin to believe we are not represented—not protected—not treated as full political subjects—then the rupture is not emotional. It is constitutional.

Taxation is not charity. It is consent. Consent requires representation. If the state can mobilize instantly to protect certain lives, certain interests, certain reputations—but remains inert when women report harm, coercion, or predation—then the bargain has fractured.

And once that bargain fractures, a destabilizing question emerges: Why are we funding a system that does not treat our lives as emergencies? That question is not extremism. It is foundational American logic. When citizens come to believe that their tax dollars shield power while their own endangerment is ignored, tax morale collapses. And when tax morale collapses, legitimacy follows. A republic cannot survive widespread belief that some citizens are funding their own disposability.

Protection is proof of belonging. Belonging is oxygen. When there is no siren for you, you begin to wonder whether you were ever inside the circle at all. That is the corrosion. Not simply anger. Not simply grievance. But the slow erosion of the belief that your life would count as an emergency.

A society can survive inequality. It can survive incompetence. It can survive bureaucracy. It cannot survive widespread belief in selective humanity.

Because once citizens conclude that emergency response is selective, that representation is conditional, that protection is hierarchical—cooperation shrinks. Empathy contracts. Resentment expands. And the sirens—once symbols of collective care—become symbols of exclusion.

Red lights washing over faces that no longer feel protected. Knowing someone, somewhere, qualifies.

And wondering what it would take for women's lives to count.