Swearing-In Ceremonies

Members of the Public, Officers-Elect, Friends and Family,

Welcome. My name is David Henry, and I am chair of the Monroe County Democratic Party. It is a joy today to open this ceremonial swearing-in of our county, township, and school board officers for the 2023 term.

I first would like to thank the family and friends of those taking their oaths today.

I also would like to thank the Board of Commissioners and the staff who opened our courthouse today for today’s event, and the work of our local media to share this day in our civic life with our community.

I also thank my colleague across the aisle, Republican Chairwoman Taylor Bryant, joining us in the bi-partisan spirit that this occasion honors. With a new year comes new hope for consensus and compromise that serve our whole community.

Now, as I often say, there is nothing that a college lecturer loves more than a captive audience.  

So I hope you put your New Year’s Dinner in the InstaPot because I am just warming up.

I’m kidding. I’ll be brief. I’ve got sports to watch.

I’m not a Hoosier by birth, but by choice off and on over these past 20 years. And for me, occasions like this led me into history books to get a better sense of this place I’ve called home.

That includes this historical deep cut on the nature of Hoosier government.

In 1830, when the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville made his great survey of our corner of the world in his “Democracy in America,” he lamented of our frontier politics on occupied native lands that settlers who streamed into what would become Southern Indiana were

“in every respect, inferior to the Americans who inhabit the older parts of the Union. But they already exercise a great influence in its councils, and they arrive at the government of the commonwealth before they have learned to govern themselves.”

Ooof.

Adding insult to injury was a contemporary of de Tocqueville, an Englishman who also engaged in this sort of “Cletus Safari” that the New York Times might conduct today in the American Midwest, in saying in an editorial to the “Evansville Gazette” in territorial Indiana that:

“ where judges, associates, sheriffs, clerks, coroners, magistrate, commissioners, from the highest to the least, are elected in a general election, it is impossible that these offices should be generally well filled. The whole system is ridiculous and exposes people constantly to the risk of having the most important” positions give to “persons utterly unqualified…merely on account of their general popularity.”

Snobs.

This critique is coming from folks who were governed by Prince Harry’s ancestors, who were both utterly unqualified AND it didn’t matter if they were popular or not – they were born into it and you were stuck with ‘em anyway 

200 years onward, Indiana still ranks highly among states with elected officials per capita, even after the elimination of township assessors a few years back. While some states have county councils, most that do, do not also have county commissioners. Or elect assessors and surveyors and coroners for that matter.

That is to say, Hoosiers like them some government.

That yes, Alexis, we have a popular democracy.

And we have learned to govern ourselves.

Speaking of ancestors and snobbery, I am reminded today of my late grandma Ethel.

Raised in the Great Depression as all Grandmas were, my Gramma admired, as many aspiring middle-class folks did, the writings of Emily Post – who taught in her etiquette books on the East Coast that politics and religion were not acceptable subjects in mixed company. You just don’t say yeah, and you don’t say nay.

Who has heard that one before?

Snobs again!

Clearly Emily Post never came to Indiana, where not only are those subjects hardly taboo – they are Second only to Basketball as the national pastime of the Hoosier Nation!

What we Hoosiers like – and what we expect - is a raucous yet respectable representative government.

That we retain the very right to weigh in on who does the work, and a belief that governing is not solely about the best practices and the evidence-based certitude of an idea.

It is also about the need to assure that, if you are the one leading this parade, that you check from time to time if the parade didn’t turn a corner on you as you march straight ahead.

When it comes to that work and those choices, I am reminded of another political philosopher who once said,

“In all of mankind’s history, there has never been more damage done than by people who ‘thought they were doing the right thing’.”

So said young Lucy after her friend, Charlie Brown, revealed that he has replaced her little brother Linus’s much-nuzzled security blanket exclaiming that

“I thought I was doing the right thing.”

Sometimes what works doesn’t need fixing. Sometimes we need to wear the safety blanket threadbare. Sometimes we do need to replace the safety blanket with a new one, or with freedom from the blanket to begin with.

When it comes to choosing that right play, Hoosier Basketball is again serviceable. The public comment in the cheap seats is full of coaches who think they can call the 2-minute drill of doing the right thing better than you. 

And unlike roundball from IU to the MCCSC, these experts have a vote on you, the coach!

From those days 200 years ago on the Ohio River to today, we Hoosiers enjoy the rough and tumble of the political debate.

But on great days like this however, we put down the swords and slogans, and pick up the pens and the prospect of our shared future.

We celebrate today that our voters have elected you, and your platforms and vision, for our community – even if that vision might be downright contradictory.

And we don’t have the worry of skeptical European correspondents on a Colonial Hoosier Safari that we cannot self-govern.

We’ve been pretty good at that ever since thank you very much.

And our voters have assembled a talented team for the next term.

In picking you off the bench and sending you into the game, we the voters expect the teamwork that will carry us to community consensus, to a sustainable commons, for a better government, for an inclusive and equitable civic life -- for the greater good.

And you should know by now, that not only your supporters support you, but we all do.

We are counting on you.

We are relying on you, to keep the roads clear and the sewers flowing, to balance the books, to strive for equal justice under law, to provide the helping hand that is the charitable mission of township government, to assure our kids have an education competitive for this century.

To both listen and to lead.

To grow and to sustain.

To both do and not do.

To prove the skeptics wrong.

That is to say, to govern.

Good Luck to You All.

Happy New Year, and Happy New Term!

Thank you.