The following is the text of Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson?s NLC Presidential Acceptance Speech at the Congress of Cities and Exposition on December 9.

Thank you very much. I?m grateful for your expression of support. Becoming president of the National League of Cities is a great honor for me and for our city. My predecessors Dick Lugar, now a distinguished United States Senator, and Bill Hudnut also served as NLC president. I?m proud to follow in their footsteps and in the footsteps of the man who passed me the gavel, Jim Hunt.

Jim is as inspiring a leader as I?ve known. He has a heart as big as all of West Virginia and a vision extending beyond Clarksburg to every corner of every big city and every small town in our great country. To champion inclusion with the passion Jim brings, one has to be able to understand the pernicious effects of exclusion. Jim knows our full greatness as a nation will not be achieved if any person or group is left behind.

I?m looking forward to working even more closely in the coming year with Cynthia McCollum. It would be hard to find in our vast organization someone as thoughtful and committed to public service, to local government and to NLC as Cynthia. Her integrity shines like a beacon.

And Kathie Novak will be a great addition to our leadership team. It?s impossible not to like her, which is a good trait for a politician. But she brings so much else to the table, including remarkable leadership and consensus-building skills.

I want to thank NLC?s outstanding staff, led by our director, Don Borut. Most people cite other elected officials who inspired them to become more active in NLC. Don is the one who inspired me ? who showed me that a national advocacy group could have an incredibly strong staff and still be a member-driven organization. Thanks, Don, to you and your team for making NLC a model national organization.

I?m blessed to be joined today by many members of my family, which was a wonderful surprise to me when I learned a month ago they were coming all this way. My wife, Amy. My parents, Howard and Lori Peterson. My three sisters, Cheryl, Celeste and Sandy, and Sandy?s new husband, Chuck. My brother, Tim. And my niece, Kim. Everything I have accomplished or ever will accomplish I owe to Amy, our daughter Meg, and the family I grew up with. Thank you!

Indianapolis has many elected and appointed officials who are active in NLC. I want to extend my appreciation and affection to the members of our city-county council and the city staff who are here today, along with Indiana Association of Cities and Towns staff and a few friends from back home. You are the ones who make our city great and I?m proud to serve on the same team with you.

As I look forward to the year ahead, I am excited about new avenues for intensifying our advocacy on Capitol Hill. Lobbying for cities and towns has been and must continue to be our top priority. I?m energized, as I know you are, by our focus on membership growth and emphasizing ?close to home issues? ? issues that bear on our daily jobs as local elected officials. And I?m excited about leading NLC in a way that promotes the values that attracted me to it in the beginning.

The first is peer support. No one can really understand what it?s like to be a local elected official until you have done it. For us, NLC is something of a refuge ? filled with people who appreciate the demanding, often thankless nature of this peculiar form of public service.

The second is bipartisan cooperation. Unlike the federal government, and increasingly many states, government in America?s cities, towns and villages is not dysfunctional. On the contrary, we share one mantra regardless of party affiliation ? get the job done. We bring that same spirit to NLC.

And the third is substance. Involvement in NLC brings real value ? to each of us as elected officials and to the communities we serve. Education and training, policy analysis, advocacy, best practices from across the country, even brainstorming with a group of smart and like-minded colleagues ? NLC gives us far more than our money?s worth.

To these three values that I spotted in the organization right away, I would add another I have observed over the years ? a commitment to tackling challenging subjects. And the challenging subject I will bring to NLC this year is the problem of media violence and its effect on children.

Many cities across America, including my own, are experiencing a frightening increase in violent crime, and it seems to be particularly bad among young people ? kids as young as 13 or 14 shooting each other today when 10 or 20 years ago they would have settled their arguments with name-calling or at worst a fist fight.

I?d give anything to be able to pinpoint an exact cause for this spike in crime. Many mayors, council members and police chiefs offer their best guesses, but in the end simply admit that they don?t really know ? they?ve never seen anything quite like this.

Horrific crimes are occurring not just in big cities, but in places as bucolic and isolated as an Amish village in Pennsylvania.

But it?s more than just crime. Our society is becoming coarsened, and everyone sees it. Just about everything but treating people with respect and demonstrating empathy for others is glorified in all forms of media today. Children grow up seeing fictional murders by the hundreds before the age of 10, and the ultimate acts of violence are no longer off-screen and left to the imagination. It?s all there for us ? and them ? to see in its gory detail.

The violence, indifference to the suffering of others, abuse of women, and disrespect for authority in video games, song lyrics, movies and television paints a picture for our young people of a dark and forbidding world. As parents, we try to instill in them from their earliest age hope and optimism ? describing a world that we see as beautiful. All the while, they are being bombarded with images of a world that is ugly.

Is there a connection between media violence and anti-social or violent behavior in our society? Can media violence be blamed in part for tragedies like Columbine? All I know is that when I was a kid there were disaffected students, students who felt ostracized, students who were bullied, left out, humiliated ? but they didn?t shoot up their schools. Something has changed.

I also know there is a significant and growing body of research demonstrating a connection between aggressive, anti-social behavior and exposure to media violence in many children. Especially with interactive simulated violence, physiological changes occur in the brains of children and adults. Most don?t follow up hours of video-game violence with criminal acts, but can we ignore the connection when we have evidence of many who do, and when we see so plainly that our society is cruder and our crime rates are rising?

I believe we, the members of the National League of Cities and the more than 200 million Americans we represent, will benefit from a dialogue on this troubling topic. I don?t expect us to find clear-cut, irrefutable answers to the questions posed today and the many others we will ask, but we will be in a better position a year from now to talk with parents and our other constituents about media violence, to understand a powerful force that may well be degrading the quality of life in our communities, and to do what we do best ? provide leadership for those we serve on the great issues of the day.

All of us who are active in NLC learned long ago that our job descriptions may read: paver of streets, builder of sidewalks, treater of wastewater, and provider of public safety ? and we certainly are expected to do those things, flawlessly ? but what is really expected of us, and what we demand of ourselves, is that we will lead our cities, our towns, our villages. Whatever matters to the people we represent matters to us. When they hurt, we hurt. When they feel joy, we feel joy.

What a special privilege it is to share in the lives of hundreds, thousands of people in that way! It has been my honor to serve the people of Indianapolis for seven years. I will continue to do that with 100 percent of my time and effort. With the second 100 percent of my time and effort, I will serve you and this great organization!