Alpe d'Huez said:
I don't know who started this analogy before you, but co-workers in a company is NOT the same as racing on a team with, and against each other. It's more like finding out a rival stock broker is using insider trading to rip people off, including perhaps you. If he were stripped of his SEC license, would you then speak out against what he did? That's a closer analogy to me than speaking out about co-workers taking paper clips home.
It depends on your reading of the work space.
What if the general culture in the stock-trade was insider-treading? What if those in charge of licenses, oversight, and punitive actions had a steering hand in it too? What if your own employer had a role as well?
What if it probably wasn't the rogue trader who would lose his license, but the chance that the closed shoulder network wouldn't snap by your "crusade", and the chance that it would be you out of a job was an equally realistic one?
To that, add a massive upheaval to your personal life for the next x-years, a guaranteed position as some sort of global spotlight pinball, a past that will constantly come back to you even if you decide to move on with life.....
You start to add all sorts of real life complications that you probably never really signed up for when you simply wanted to be banker and provide for you and your dearest.
I am not condoning, I am not saying there should be no guilt amongst thieves.
But it ain't black and white to me. Kimmage remains diplomatic, but has become quite black and white as well. Now.
From someone who kept his era's omerta about the pre-determined-crit-results (granted, a different scale, but a sham nevertheless), and who wasn't ratting out his close cycling connections there and then either, when dope was common place in his era too, but found that courage after the event, once he had removed himself and secured a new role for himself that buttered his bread, in a book-for-sale, that also didn't have the guts to name folk and stand up to them.... hmmmm.
I admire his dedication and crusade. I get the frustration. I get why he feels this is the time to make a communal heave-ho.
But I am not as impressed as some here, when he insists others
should do what he didn't have in him himself, and only found at a time when it no longer really costs him, I think.
I am sure people invited him to be a bit more gutsy when he published his book too (amidst all the vilifying he got to endure). At that time, throughout, on the bike and freshly off it, he too, constantly, judged what would be too pricey, what he was personally was willing to do, and what to swallow, and acted accordingly.
He has changed seats now, and has taken the role of being the "black and white" encourager and persuader. The annoying wasp that won't go away and keeps stinging. The one that keeps telling even the Kimmages to be bolder. [I am glad he does so, btw, I am complicated that way.]
The thing is, the people he is addressing, like Roche, are just as much the sort of Kimmage that he was, and probably still is, by deciding what is wise for themselves, given where they are at and what
their own consequences are.
Regardless what forum posters here think folk like Roche "obviously" should do next, I think anyone is perfectly entitled to make up their own mind when it comes to their own lives.
I have surged forwards into other people's fights. It is a risk I take, and a risk I encourage others to take, for many reasons. But it is a risk with a potentially high price tag. It is my decision, nad I won't let anyone make it for me either. I won't insist that anyone should surge forwards because I feel they should, for that reason. I won't be paying their price, only the one I am willing to stake myself. We all keep within our own limits, even the risk takers. So if I am calling for pain on the horizon, and it is all
their bones in the firing line,
they decide for themselves. And I will respect their personal choice in it.
I might adjust my clap-o-meter according to the stance they take. I might try to find a route to still get my way, even if it costs them, if I think it is for the greater good. But I won't disrespect anyone for coming to reasonable alternative conclusions, for how active they should become on -mostly- my behalf, for what I want (more).