Sen. Brad Farrin Delivers This Week’s Senate Republican Radio Address

What a difference 20 years can make.

Hello, I am Senator Brad Farrin of Norridgewock

Two decades ago, we all awoke to the morning news that changed our lives forever. Nearly 3,000 fellow Americans were killed in coordinated terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania.

In contrast to the horrifying images we all saw on our TV screens that morning, we also witnessed acts of unbridled heroism as hundreds of first responders—firefighters, EMS, police officers, doctors, nurses—all ran toward the danger and toward those in need, many of them never to return.

For weeks afterward we mourned and paid tribute, not only to the civilian victims who died in their place of work, but also to the brave men and women who willingly risked and gave their lives trying to save them.

These events and this heroism brought us together as a nation like never before in my lifetime. But 20 years is a long time, and those feelings fade with our memories of that morning.

After 9:00 am on September 11, 2001, a spirit of unity, respect, and decency pervaded our culture for a very long time. Today, we are far from that spirit. Whatever it was that made us quick to shrug off the things that separated us—race, religion, political perspectives, and the like—seems to have given way to a need to identify and exploit that which divides us.

in 2001 we were all moved at the sacrifice, the selflessness displayed by others and how that brought out what Abraham Lincoln once called “the better angels of our nature.”

Today, the movements that seem to define us are more often rooted in what divides us rather than bringing us together. As a people, Americans still have far more in common than we do things that drive us apart, but we seem to have lost touch with those unifying influences.

None of us wants to relive the horror and loss that we all experienced two decades ago, but we might do well as a people to dwell for a moment on the feelings we experienced on and after that tragic day and try to reacquaint ourselves with whatever it is that aroused in us a unifying, sympathetic spirit that seems to have utterly abandoned us.

Again, I am State Senator Brad Farrin, hoping for a more tolerant change of heart for all.