Summary Of Calvin Coolidge's 'Have Faith In Massachusetts'

Calvin Coolidge distinctly mentions numerous values in this excerpt from “Have Faith in Massachusetts.” However, his candid support of both revolutionary and reactionary actions implies a deeply significant value that finds importance and relevance not only in the present age of humanity but also in all ages past. Volutum and actum, the Latin root words of revolutionary and reactionary, respectively, find their most basic form in the words volvo and ago. I roll. I do. These simplistic definitions are neither synonymous nor antonymous. Yet, when altered by affixes, they become polar opposites. “I roll” becomes “someone who wishes to roll, to change, and to advance society into a never-before-seen creation that promises progress” while “I do”
Every need coerces individuals to take actions that directly affect the balance in that individual’s life and indirectly affect the balance of larger issues. To illustrate, many of the Catholic popes of the European Middle Ages were highly corrupt and greedy. One pope might have had an individual need to gather more wealth in order to balance an alleged disparity between what he thought he deserved and what he actually owned. This need could have led to numerous actions that would have directly increased the pope’s wealth and at least partially fulfilled his need for balance, real or imagined. However, this action would have affected larger needs by prolonging the destitution of the Dark Ages through the upsetting of the natural balance of wealth. Yet, not all individual needs drive the world away from a state of balance. The Catholic Church was eventually reformed as the result of a secondary effect from Martin Luther’s fulfillment of his individual needs. Overall, individual needs almost always result in actions that bring a person closer to their own sense of balance while typically imposing extremely minute alterations on the ebbs and flows of large concerns for