 You were asking me about me. I was never asked about me. Why do they hate us? Why do we have so many enemies? It's been 15 years since 9-11, but terrorism is still there. These were the good old days when friends and family were allowed to go straight to the air bridge to meet you. I'm the girl with the balloons. I'm Yanni, a 15-year-old exchange student from Russia, staying with an American family. I'm in the U.S. under the Freedom Support Act, a program designed to offer a taste of life in a democracy. America has already taught me to greet everything with wow and cool. It let me discover the taste of french fries and gave me my first ever pair of contact lenses. It's 15 years since reality in America changed forever. I wonder if the words freedom and democracy have a different ring to them now too. I've come back after all these years to see how ordinary Americans feel now, and how they see their future. I don't understand. Why is it so bad? Oh, you, uh, you have asthma? Big deal. Who cares? You're afraid the terrorists is going to blow up the train that you're riding in the city? Just get it together. Figure it out. Get over it. Do you have people literally telling this to your face? Yes. I have people. How about, um, how about members of the Congress? It's not just people. There are people that think this is a joke. Let's, let's take, I forgot to take my inhalers. So stay right there. I didn't, I have all of them. I just have to get them. Okay. I'll be back in one second. It's okay. One of the benefits of, um, having lung issues is that you can't, you can't get angry like that. I went to ground zero because I thought I could help, but it turned out that I couldn't do very much. Instead of being a help, I turned into a casualty. And now I have to be taken care of to the tune of, well, over $100,000 a year for just medicines alone. You have to take three different ones at a time. This is my badge actually. I always do that to show respect to the dead. So I used to wear that on my uniform. I wrote the song after 9-11. Oh, you did? That's how I dealt with it. Yeah. Yeah, this is it. You start talking. It brings you close to it. It's like that hot potato nobody wants to touch. But it's a hot potato, you know? It still is. It's still hot potato. It doesn't go away. It doesn't. This is something that we have to live for for the rest of our life. My family's 100 years in New York City. We've been living there 100 years. So I'm more of a New Yorker than probably anyone here. My family has been through it all. They participated in a lot of the important developments in New York City, working on construction sites, the George Washington Bridge, or the Empire State Building. I'm a twin and me and my twin sister. I had to be about seven or eight, I guess. And my parents took us to see the Twin Towers under construction. You know, we joked that the Twin Towers were being built in our honor. And one was named John. The other one was named Jennifer. Yeah, it was just, you know, little kids playing games. Was it a symbol of something back then? You know, the, like, chaos? It was a symbol of the might of America. Of this great city, this great country that we could build, not just one great tower, but two great towers, right? Two magnificent towers. Nelly Brakinskaya was 43 when she came to the U.S. from the Soviet Union with her son. She had no money or connections, but a lot of hope for a better future for her only child. I met a boss and a man and a woman. But in the form of, I understood that this was a high position. And they got up from both sides. I was like, what? Why do I need to calm down? I don't need to. I'm fine. My son is fine. We'll still be drinking champagne, and vodka is also Russian. Everything will be fine. Listen to me. First of all, I know Alex. He won't be sitting in the smoke and waiting for him to breathe. Never in his life. This is not a person. Secondly, when I got his paper, it was written on the convention that it was the item number one. This is the first thing that was found under the first number. Today he fell into the house, and tomorrow he will live. Of course, he will get up, of course. He doesn't change his mind. I get up in the morning and come to him. I'm healthy with him. I kiss him. I say that I love him very much. I read the lyrics, of course. I feel that he is here. He is always here. He is always with me. I advise him. And if he asks us what kind of melody, what kind of music, what kind of film, what kind of performance does he show? This is what he listened to, this is what he sang, this is what he loved, this is what he read. I open his books with notes. Well, he lives here. He is with me all the time. I advise him. I ask him where to do it, where not to do it. He answers the questions. Tell her a little bit about, I guess what I did. I never really thought about this. You know, I grew up in Colombia. I mean, when I came to this country, my city was the most dangerous place in the world. So I grew up with an awareness of really bad things happening. And I mean, maybe that's why I became a trauma psychologist. Maybe that's why I was able to deal with people in pain. I was 25 years old at the time. I can tell you a thousand stories about 9-11. You know, I can tell the story about the widow. I can tell the story about the person who saw people falling because they were desperate to evacuate. They wanted to kill themselves. They were cutting themselves. They were pulling their hair out because some people just could not get the vision of seeing others fall off the building out of their minds. They couldn't stop thinking about when they evacuated all the stairs, you know, hearing screams of people. Most days were difficult. Some were awful. Some were, like, just too much. Every day was a new challenge. There were lines of patience. How did you feel? I was a little scared and, you know, frustrated and not knowing. You know, I don't think I felt anything, quite frankly. So you're asking me about me. I was never asked about me. Well, from the therapist's perspective, most of my time is spent asking questions and finding ways to heal someone, you know. I'm always focused, like, how can I make this person have a better tomorrow? You know, in many ways, in order to do that, you have to shut down. So you shut down. And you can't really predict for how long a person will shut down. I think I've been very shut down. Traumatic events stay with you. Every anniversary, days before, days after, you feel tense, you feel anxious, you feel the same sense of, like, fear and distress that you've felt before. And that's what people will tell you. This is really good thing. Chubby? You don't like it? It's a cool one. We can shape it. Yeah, I'll tell us a few words about chubby. So what? Chubby's a tree. Chubby? What's the chubby is? That. That. I'm chubby. It's beautiful. I like it. It's so green. Let's go back to where America was before September 11th. People were more carefree. They didn't think about terrorism. They didn't think about war or attacks. That was something that was having far away. If you drive up here through all these small towns, you will see almost every town has a monument like this. Really? Almost every town. Every town here lost three, four or five people. I think what's very tragic for Americans, so a lot of people are still in a state of denial. They really don't want to talk about it. They don't want to remember it. I think there's more and more now suspicion of outsiders, especially when you get out of the big cities in America. Everyone is looking at each other as sort of like a potential threat to terrorists. It's soaking into people's consciousness on a subconscious level. This idea, if you see something, say something. It's taken me, say, three years to get finally to be accepted here in this town. I am a pretty much a local guy. People know my family. I'm still an outsider, you see? I've been away for a long time. I've been away for a long time. That was never an issue before. We really did have a traditional history of rights and democracy in this country up until 9-11. I came from the old America where you couldn't have surveillance cameras. That was considered unconstitutional and evasion of privacy. I remember huge scandals when I was a kid, because the police had a suspect and they would go to the suspect's garbage, which was on the curbside. But they didn't have a search warrant from the court. So the judge said that's illegal. The police have no right to go to the garbage of a suspect until they get a search warrant. I mean, now it sounds ridiculous. The police can break down your door with guns, throw you to the ground, threaten your entire family, and they don't need a warrant. Under the pretext of anti-terrorist measures, they can do almost anything they want by using the terrorist threat. They can justify any action. We have to accept it. That's the reality. That's the new America. It's like, welcome to the new America. There are people that just left that never came back, and then there are new people like me who came to New York, who wasn't afraid to come to New York and move here, even though the attacks happened, you know, several years prior. I love New York. Everything's changed. The very idea of talking and having a conversation, just you and I, as regular people about terrorists or terrorism or things we're seeing on TV all the time, people didn't talk like that. We didn't discuss those things. We weren't thinking like that. It's common language now. Isn't that something? What about your rights and freedoms? Are you willing to give some of them up now to stay safer? I would be okay with some of it, or maybe all of it if it means a safer country and place to live. Because ultimately, whether someone's tapping my phone or not is not as significant as someone, you know, bombing someone down the street when there's a marathon or a plane goes by or something like that. I mean, do you have any idea how close the helicopters get to where I live? Like, if a helicopter or plane wanted to come right now in this building, we're, you know, we're 61 stories high. That could happen. So I will give up that to make sure that a plane doesn't do something like it did before. And I think that's the challenge. Everyone's trying to figure out what's the next thing that's going to happen. This building starts on the 50th floor for the apartments. So I only get to my apartment from the elevator. I've never taken the stairs all the way down. I should time myself to get out. I could probably count on one hand from 9-11 till now how many times I've been on the train. I won't go. Phones always charged, never turned off. Always have my badge and my ID on me. Always. God forbid something happens. You can get access where others can't. I always have a certain amount of money with me. Takes the ATM to stop working. I've never driven anything but a Jeep since 9-11. Because I remember saying, well, a Jeep will get over a lot of debris. So if they knock down buildings, I can get out of here. I can drive over it. I just instinctively would watch planes fly over whenever I heard them. So I just, whenever I see a plane, I just, I mean, and I noticed that I'm with friends and they do the same thing. And then they was watching go by. As soon as it's out of sight, okay. I mean, something in my head's like, all right, you know, that's good. Planes out of the area. I'm glad that I volunteer here at the museum. When given the opportunity, talk about the people that were lost that day. Give people a firsthand account of what happened. And then when given the opportunity, talk about my friends that I lost because their memory needs to stay alive. I mean, there's 2977 people that day that were murdered. The hundreds that have died since then that everybody forgets now. My great days are with my kids and my grandkids. If I didn't have a family, I, I, it's not, we wouldn't be having this conversation, Yana. I would have, you know, ended my life a long time ago. Because it was that painful. Most of terrorism is not the actual act. It's the fear. They've accomplished that, all right. I mean, I'd hate to admit it. I was so suspicious once when I was flying that I, I mean, I went up to the airline and I said, I just feel uncomfortable. The worst thing for me was they actually didn't let the guy fly. I mean, I remember the air marshals letting him board. As soon as everybody sat down, they got up and they took him off the plane. And I was like, oh my God, I mean, did I make a mistake or was that something? So, I mean, yeah, I mean, I think I have legitimate reasons for being afraid. Because if you get too complacent, they're going to attack again. I mean, I'm glad that they're that vigilant. Introduce you my American family. It's my mom. Okay. My name's Ardith. Yes. I've been married to Deloitte for 22 years. So, it's my dad. And he doesn't love me because he doesn't have any place in his heart for me because his heart is for computers, you know? Yes. It was a really good experience for me. It was fun to watch you when you experience new things. It's when you had a French fries for the first time and you're like, ooh. It's really good. I remember the time that you helped Ardith with her strike down at Fred Meyer. That was fun to you. I felt that it was something meaningful. And fun, too. So, has America changed in all those years? Or are you... has it? Of course. We've had good times and bad times since then. I worked in aviation and we built avionics for small airplanes. And when we first heard about 9-11s and we heard that a small airplane had hit one of the towers. So I jumped up and turned the TV on because I was afraid one of our aviation navigators had misdirected somebody. He thought it was his fault. They could be guilty for something. And then when the second one hit, it was like terrorists. We thought in America it would never come here but it came here. We're more aware of it now, too. I think it has impacted the country financially, though. I think that's part of the scare in the stock market. Is it something like this? Can happen anything in it? Within a day, destroy things. And we worry that they'll attack the financial system. There is a lot of fear that wasn't there before. You just worry that what's going to happen next. I remember when the Bart trained me the other day with Sean and his family. A man got on and he was wearing the headdress of somebody. And I thought, what if he has a poem? It's like, alert, alert! I know, I know. But that's our self-preservation. We watch for it. If we think it's happening, then we'll do something about it. The military used to stay on full alert, dispersal of population and assets against air attack to stay in place. You won't know the mobilization alarms if you hear them act immediately. He sighed, and let's pray the war is over. She looks a lot better. I mean, it's been like 15 years since 9-11. But terrorism is still there. The attacks that they had in Paris. At least we haven't had any major attacks in the United States. But to hear that it can happen in Paris and other places in the world, it makes people nervous. They are changing our constitution in a way that most of us don't like in the name of more security. And this whole gun thing is just ridiculous. There's no way most Americans are ever going to let Obama or... Hillary Clinton. ...or anyone else take aware of guns. Because that's a last defense against a bad government. John doubted the government Frederick's representative would be willing to drop a neutron bomb on them. Two or three fuel-air explosives could nevertheless destroy his beloved valley and all of whom he held dear. A lot of these Buxom movies all show other countries coming in and invading them. So we have that kind of fear in the back door of minds. It had to end now. Ask the question, why do we have so many enemies? And this is the thing today in America. People don't want to ask this question. Why do they hate us? Why do we have so many enemies? Nobody wants to have this discussion here. We created this monster in Afghanistan, right? We armed them. We trained them. We emboldened them. We gave them the support and then they turned against us. The whole idea of the war on terror, I think it's obnoxious. When we don't know who our target is, when we do it based on non-facts, preconceived notions or on ideas that we have about someone we're wanting to target anyway. Here we are, the Mayadis Empire. And we cannot defeat these people who live in caves, whether it's Syria or Afghanistan. We have bases all around the world. We spend trillions of dollars on defense budget. But somehow we can't find these people. We can't destroy them. Why? Why can't we stop them? Why did this war, why did it still go on 15 years later? Personally, I think it's because at this point it's business. It's business. People are making so much money. What do we get? We get insecurities. We get fears. We get the danger of all sorts. The more we get involved in the Middle East, the more powerful these terrorist groups become, the more fanatically they become. They see us as invaders and now they want their revenge. I probably feel the same way that a lot of folks feel helpless. What can I personally do? I really don't know. It's very anxiety provoking, I would say. Unfortunately, I'm really sorry to say this, but it's probably a matter of time before another big terrorist attack happens in the U.S. Is that where we're heading? Is it too late to stop that?