I decided not to go hunting for Terrance after all because he was probably getting settled among the alcoholics who had not rejected eternal life and was just finding what that was all about. I did not want to interrupt anything. Now I started to run down my check list to see if I ought to be somewhere else. Was anyone in the family, sick or in trouble or even dying?
I wanted to ask Coral what was being done for molested children as I thought a whole lot of troubles on earth started with this happening to a child. I was pretty sure this had been my dad's fate when he was too young to do anything about it. Molested children was such a difficult issue on earth people had not followed up on very many studies about what happened to them when they grew up. I was sure they would discover that a certain percentage of them may have turned molester themselves and some might continue these activities in spite of how they got started, after they married and had a family and tried to live 'normal' lives.
Many molested children simply did not tell anybody, so were not on in any public record of having been molested.
Coral said that of course children murdered in sexual assaults were some of the most heart breaking cases their benefactors had to help try to recover from such horrors. So she knew all about that branch of the Children's Paradise.
I told Coral I wanted to try to establish a connection in the hereafter to some of the people arriving there who had been molested as children as I had been. I had attempted to connect to other victims on earth, but did not quite know how to go about it in the hereafter. I said, you need something like an Internet here like we have on earth and Coral burst into peals of laughter.
We have something better than your Internet, she told me, and we can always use it, too, if we need to. She told me they were just leaving me alone to get comfortable upon passing. She had not realized I wanted to connect to more people.
I was really quite mystified at this point about how the hereafter worked. "What country do you belong to?" I asked Coral. "Who is your president?"
Coral again burst into peals of laughter. "Excuse me for laughing at you," she said, "but I always get a kick out of all the misconceptions people have about how the hereafter is supposed to work. We don't have a president, and we are not divided up into countries. We just serve as needed."
This did not tell me a whole lot. Coral read my mind and said, "Do you want to go visit President Obama?"
"No!" I said startled. "I doubt if he would pay any attention to me but how about visiting former President Kennedy?"
"You got it," said Coral, snapping her fingers. "I would love to take you to a conference with President Kennedy. He has assured us if someone arrives from earth that we think has done a good job alerting people to danger, he will see them immediately if we contact him."
Coral acted like she could hardly wait and soon had me hurrying off as fast as I could go for this historic meeting! As soon as we arrived she told someone that she wanted to see John Kennedy, the former president of the United States , as one of her relatives had arrived she thought he needed to meet.
John Kennedy himself soon came striding out to talk to us. He shook hands with Coral and Coral introduced me! Yes, I found myself shaking hands with John Kennedy a lot sooner than I expected to, I can tell you that.
"First of all," I found myself saying quite boldly, "James Dean, the movie actor who was killed before you passed came from the hereafter about two months before your assassination and told me 'someone in governmental circles in his forties with a theatrical personality is going to die'."
"That describes me pretty well," said John Kennedy.
"The fact that Jimmy brought the message threw me off. I kept thinking it was going to be an important person in the movie business who was very political. I just could not imagine that the assassination of a president was going to take place."
"I lived dangerously," said Kennedy.
"I am James Dean's age, younger than you are," I said. I was born in 1931."
"Were you a democrat? Did you vote for me?"
"Yes, despite the fact that I was disturbed by some aspects of your personality. I have read many books about you since. I could not help myself. Like many Americans, I studied you in depth, trying to understand what happened, as we were all so affected by the assassination."
"I could not believe it was happening to me either," said Kennedy. "But in retrospect I could see why my character, my excesses, played a part in my destiny."
"I was asking my sister Coral, how are you governed here?"
"Naturally I play a role in the hereafter just as I did there as many people want to see me. They want to know what my take is on my relatively few years in office. They want to know what I would have done differently, and so on. But I no longer feel I belong to any country since here we are working more for the good of mankind. Whoever suffers on the earth affects the well being and good health of all the others. I know that might sound a little extreme, but since nuclear weapons even a dictator of a small country could conceivably destroy the earth as we know it with a nuclear attack so to my mind people have to think what is good for all more than they used to. People who come to the hereafter are disappointed because I no longer talk like a politician perpetually running for office."
"I would be disappointed if you did. I always wondered what you would have done when the abortion issue came along. Your brother Teddy abandoned the Catholic position on abortion and supported pro choice. I saw him once when a political meeting was held in the old Le Grand Hotel ballroom. He was trying to help Kerry get elected to office. I came specifically to ask him about the abortion issue, but of course nobody was allowed to talk to him. The loyal democrats surrounding him saw to that. My being a registered democrat made no difference. This was a very disappointing meeting to me. Nobody said anything thoughtful.'
"That's the trouble with the democrats going so strongly with a pro choice democratic platform. They just as well have knocked out all the Catholic supporters, which is one reason I think they have struggled ever since. You can't fight the good that religions do, regardless of the fact that they also do bad.
As a matter of fact the Kennedy brothers have had some of their most heated debates among themselves since Teddy joined us on this side on the issue of abortion. It is a most troublesome issue for the Kennedy brothers especially who were raised Catholic. So this is the kind of discussion you would have initiated with my brother Teddy? I am going to tell him that I just spoke in the hereafter to a woman who wanted to debate the abortion issue with him on the campaign trail. I take it you were a pro life activist?"
"As much as I could be. I took it upon myself to write protest letters to my newspaper in particular, the Arizona Republic, which went liberal in a big way and printed many many columns supporting abortion, telling women how to accept it, how not to feel guilty, which has become known among pro life activists as a 'liberal bias'. I connected up to pro life Catholic activists toward the end of my life who reactivated a lot of protesting to abortion clinics trying to 'save one baby at a time'".
"Oh yes," said Kennedy, "I told Bobby look at how the media is going pro choice. This is fooling the democrats into thinking that the country is going pro choice, but instead many of the people abandoned their newspapers which had become too liberal for them to accept on the subject of abortion."
"I say that the divisiveness that has developed is as much the fault of the liberals as it is of the conservatives or more because with the embrace of the abortion solution endorsing the violence of bloodshed, the liberals lost a lot of ground they had gained in being for civil rights for all minorities and so on. I could see big trouble down the road coming for the democratic party, and now it is here."
"I agree with you!" said Kennedy. "I could not have said it better. Thank you, for bringing your sister to meet me," he said, turning to Coral. "I, who was turned out of office, by the fatal shedding of my blood, as was my brother taken out before he could ever run, we would know why a solution involving blood shed is not the right answer."
I felt that I should go, that my visit to former President Kennedy was as fruitful as it was possible at this time. I was the one who was weary from being granted the privilege of meeting him. I needed to go off and digest his words, and reflect how easy it had been to get in to see him, where on earth it would have been next to impossible to meet a president or even a former one and say to him what I had just said to former President Kennedy, as it had been impossible to say a truthful honest word about what I thought to Teddy Kennedy, campaigning for John Kerry in the very complex where I lived. The democratic faithful were there to protect him from the slightest strain and to get their pictures taken with one of the Kennedys.
I still did not know a whole lot more about the Hereafter now that I had talked to him, but I did know that all things were possible, it seemed, and that what you thought was a lot more important here than it was regarded on earth. Which was very encouraging. Coral seemed very happy, too, with our meeting. Oh my God, what an experience! I needed to digest this meeting before I made my next move!
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