Derailed by Passion
16th May 2009


Once upon a time passion was confined to the bedroom, now it’s everywhere. No, I’m not talking about sex; I mean passion with its trousers on.

Passion stalks the land. It is no longer enough simply to be enthusiastic about a job, or to have strong convictions about an issue. Today we must be passionate about these things.

In my job of running a school I am bombarded by passion. I must be passionate about teaching, passionate about learning, passionate about making a difference, passionate about keeping the toilets clean. Oddly, the one thing it is not wise to say I am passionate about is children.

As any young lover finds, when passion strikes the first casualty is reason. Being passionate about one’s job is fine as a private obsession. I can harmlessly devote my life to teaching and learning and not trouble a soul, but in a world that demands we be publicly passionate we are at constant risk of making fools of ourselves. When we use passion as the basis for spreading a cause or convincing others we almost always over-sell the idea and turn people off.

Take the motivational speaker as an example. These curious by-products of the modern age, these walking egos who strut the boardrooms and function centres of the land, are always so passionate about themselves and their achievements that they kill the message. Their success inevitably boils down to a unique combination of personality, providence and power that crushes the motivation of the audience or, at best, leaves us pursuing a model of excellence we cannot possibly realise because it is not our own.

Admittedly there are times when passion can light a flame in others. Winston Churchill famously inspired England to resist Hitler on little more than a talent for impassioned oratory. Hitler of course was doing the same in Germany. Both had the rare talent of making people feel like their actions could make a difference. It is the dream of every small town politician and civic grandee.

Locally, there has been some passion evident around the Ashburton District Council’s draft community plan. This excellent document appears to have accomplished its purpose of inspiring debate over a couple of contentious projects, particularly the new sports stadium and swimming pool complex.

The council’s proposal to push this project back ten years has its advocates passionately crowding forward in its defence. I don’t need to repeat the arguments in its favour; they have been well aired at public meetings and through the pages of this newspaper.

We have been invited to share the passion of the project’s advocates. How? By sending in a submission form to the council to let them know that we want the stadium and pool built within three years.

What has been the result of all this passion? Well, by Thursday the council had received only a couple of hundred responses to the draft plan. Unless the last 24 hours before yesterday’s deadline brought a late rush of submissions, all the passion seems to have failed in its purpose.

Personally I support the idea of building the stadium and pool sooner rather than later, but if its backers fail to gather enough support to convince the Council they may have only themselves to blame.

They oversold the idea. They overstated the benefits. To some people they made the project sound too good to be true. The rest of us they convinced to the point where we thought their plan was so obviously a no-brainer we didn’t need to make a submission in its support – the council couldn’t help but see things their way.

Let’s hope they’re right, but I suspect the Council’s processes will not bend so readily to an outburst of passion.