Never Stop Dreaming

I’m coming friend I’ll save you from the sad!!

I am here now you’re going to be okay!!!

You are so beautiful and i love you!!!

Happy Birth Antony Edward Stark born 29th May 1970

Steve has an incredibly bad perspective for a peacetime officer. His whole perspective is that they try to save as many people as they can, but ultimately people die in the course of their ultimate goal: ending the “war”. Meanwhile Tony’s ultimate goal is to save people, that’s it. There is no ideology behind him truly, only the desire to save people’s lives.

There’s a scene in some generic foreign cop show, I can’t remember which, where an ex-soldier joins a precinct and on duty he and his partner chase down a perp. The perp is a violent offender and he runs down and alley and out into a street. There’s a few cars, a few pedestrians, but overall it’s not crowded. The ex-soldier has a shot on the perp, even though there’s a good few metres between them. He stops running, lines up his shot, and prepares to fire.

His partner stops him, shoves his gun down and screams at him for, well, they cut away but it’s implied a pretty freaking long time.

Because it’s not okay. There are different rules when you deal with civilians instead of soldiers. You do not have the freedom to make potentially lethal judgment calls. It doesn’t matter how confident this man was in his judgement, it’s not his judgement to make.

Police officers making judgment calls outside of what they should be allowed is literally every criticism against the police force you will find.

Soldiers do not make good law enforcement.

The real conversation in civil war is about needs. Is it peacetime? Then no, Steve can’t do whatever he wants. But is this wartime? Has the threat reaches critical that soldiers are needed, and are allowed to violate civilian rights in the name of restoring peace? Because then that’s different.

Literally a summation of civil war is that tony has the right perspective for a peacetime officer, while Steve has the right perspective for a wartime officer. It’s deciding what condition the world is in where the lines blur.