Telling Toner to stay quiet about the charter seems like telling a fire captain to stay quiet about the fact that trainee firefighters may someday need to enter a burning building.
Or perhaps it would be more analogous to firefighting tactics historically, which, in the absence of extremely large mechanical pumps & water sources, frequently forced resorts to making firebreaks, which can involve bans, deliberate destruction, controlled burns, or in the case of fighting fires in cities, razing* entire streets down to the ground (using dynamite if you must).
No one wants to dynamite thousands of innocent peoples’ homes, but if you are in the middle of the San Francisco earthquake and there is a city-wide fire raging and all the water pipes are busted (assuming you were lucky enough to be in a time & place that they ever existed)...
* if you like anime, the Short Peace anthology shows this in the “Combustible” short. It’s spectacularly animated. Or, by sheer coincidence, I’m watching Promare about sci-fi fire fighting mecha, and the protagonist uses a traditional Japanese firefighting outfit with a hooked spear-like weapon to fight fire-aliens… and the original hook existed, of course, not to duel fire-aliens but to help demolish buildings in cities (whether or not they are on fire yet).
I think this is a good analogy. Though I think “one day you might have to dynamite a bunch of innocent people’s homes to keep a fire from spreading, that’s part of the job” is a good thing to have in the training if that’s the sort of thing that’s likely to come up.
Or perhaps it would be more analogous to firefighting tactics historically, which, in the absence of extremely large mechanical pumps & water sources, frequently forced resorts to making firebreaks, which can involve bans, deliberate destruction, controlled burns, or in the case of fighting fires in cities, razing* entire streets down to the ground (using dynamite if you must).
No one wants to dynamite thousands of innocent peoples’ homes, but if you are in the middle of the San Francisco earthquake and there is a city-wide fire raging and all the water pipes are busted (assuming you were lucky enough to be in a time & place that they ever existed)...
* if you like anime, the Short Peace anthology shows this in the “Combustible” short. It’s spectacularly animated. Or, by sheer coincidence, I’m watching Promare about sci-fi fire fighting mecha, and the protagonist uses a traditional Japanese firefighting outfit with a hooked spear-like weapon to fight fire-aliens… and the original hook existed, of course, not to duel fire-aliens but to help demolish buildings in cities (whether or not they are on fire yet).
I think this is a good analogy. Though I think “one day you might have to dynamite a bunch of innocent people’s homes to keep a fire from spreading, that’s part of the job” is a good thing to have in the training if that’s the sort of thing that’s likely to come up.