Opinion: Whatever happened to being generous, truthful and just?

The ornate tomb of Enoch Parrot in St. John’s churchyard.

The ornate tomb of Enoch Parrot in St. John’s churchyard. Jean Stimmell

By JEAN STIMMELL

Published: 06-01-2025 3:00 PM

Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jeanstimmell.blogspot.com and jstim.substack.com.

Wandering around Portsmouth, Russet and I stumbled upon the ornate tomb of Enoch Parrot in St. John’s churchyard. Parrot was born in Portsmouth and rose to the rank of admiral, playing a noteworthy role in the Civil War.

What struck us was not the homage to this war hero but rather what was engraved prominently on the front of his tomb: a description of the kind of man he was, generous, truthful and just. Those noble words seem so anachronistic, like a flashback to a time when we celebrated ethical values, so different from the dog-eat-dog world we cower in today, a victim of Trump’s mean-spirited transactionalism and the cutthroatness of big business.

It’s obvious we are not the same America we used to be: We’ve regressed from striving to uphold the principles of freedom and equality into a mindless consumer society in complete denial about the existential problems we face. Sadly, we have become addicted to Amazon, social media and pie-in-the-sky politics, tuning out the urgent problems of today.

Lost in trivia, we have surrendered to a carnival barker named Donald Trump, anointing him as our savior, an audacious pied piper who promises to set us free by scraping every tradition, principle and value that America used to hold dear.

This quest for freedom without responsibility is an affront to our destiny and will inevitably lead to our downfall — that’s what an acclaimed critic from the last century claims in a book I’m reading.

“Freedom and Destiny” is the name of the book. It was written in 1981 by Rollo May, an acclaimed existentialist psychologist with a local New Hampshire connection: He summered on Squam Lake, where he often went sailing with his friend Paul Tillich, perhaps the most influential theologian of the 20th century.

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May was prescient. He could see the storm clouds gathering back then, which have intensified into the storm we are experiencing now. He claimed that freedom is in crisis because we have totally ignored our destiny.

As an existentialist, he understood that we are not masters of our destiny, as Trump would have us believe. For most of us, the reverse is true: We are slaves to our destiny. This is because much of our lives is governed by forces beyond our control. These inevitable and unchangeable aspects of existence, shaping and limiting our lives, are what May calls our destiny.

Real freedom comes by accepting the limits that destiny places upon us. At first, that leads to despair, but May argues that’s a good thing, like an alcoholic finally admitting they have a problem.

But we are still in denial, unable to admit we have a problem.

We distract ourselves from the existential problems that threaten to do us in: extreme inequality, nuclear war and climate catastrophe, along with our neglect in bearing witness to the abject suffering all around us, proliferating from famine, poverty and violence.

We should feel despair! But that’s not what Americans have ever done. It is our most glaring shortcoming. Instead, we bury our heads in the sands of “shopping until we drop.”

May says that must change: “The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic morality… It is important to remind ourselves of these points since there are a number of signs that we in America may be on the threshold of a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair.”

Opening up to despair, according to May, is not only crucial to our survival, it is the key to our happiness: “In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. After despair, the one thing left is possibility. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open— as open as it was for Adam and Eve.”⁠

After accepting our destiny, we discover that within these restraints, there is ample space to make choices, which is what gives life its meaning. However, not all options are equal. To cope with the stark reality of our modern existence, we have no choice but to return to humanity’s perennial values, which have always been our savior when we had nowhere else to turn.

We can start by practicing the Golden Rule. Or, living up to the words engraved on Admiral Parrott’s tomb to be “generous, truthful and just.”