A seemingly confused man in Mt Gambier decrying the violation of his 14th Amendment rights, even though that pertains to America’s Constitution.

Truly we are through the portal into another universe. The door through which we enter is not a time machine, it’s not the Tardus or Doc’s modified DeLorean in Back to the Future. It’s Saturdays in Australia.

How else to explain, in polite terms, the sight of a man at last Saturday’s protests carrying a sign lamenting that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution is being trashed but that either he or others, who aren’t him, has been transported into another world, or perhaps just another country. Let’s say, the United States. For that is where the 14th Amendment to the Constitution resides. It is its home.

The fellow from Mt Gambier may well be concerned about the condition of the 14th Amendment in America, if so he is truly a universal traveller, perhaps drawing our attention to its plight. But it does seem rather odd.

This what the Amendment states:

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

It was adopted in 1868, just three years after the end of the American Civil War, during a time known as the Reconstruction.

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You can see how someone emerging from lockdowns might attach their grievances to the Amendment’s aspirations. But it’s the wrong country. It has no relevance in law, or in Australian society, to us. Still, Mt Gambier Man was out on the streets on the day labelled as “world freedom day”, so perhaps he was communing with the brotherhood in the United States. Or perhaps the protesters waving Trump 2020 banners. Idiocy truly has no borders.

Being “freedom day”, and thus freedom march allowed it to be all things to all people, thus with the 14th Amendment guy, there was in Melbourne the hang-Dan-Andrews mob, the in-a-pandemic, place-your-faith-in-Jesus followers (which as aside is interesting in that given that God created all, presumably COVID as well, he/she will deliver all either from its reach, or if not welcome its victims into heaven. God can’t lose). There’s the anti-vaxxers, who frankly seem a bit passe among this lot, and those think the government is overreaching in its legislation. And, of course, there’s some who probably just want a day out to yell stuff and the hell with it.

It’s a slippery concept, freedom. For societies to function, freedom has been sliced into “absolute” and “limitable”. Absolute, in a democracy, means among other things freedom of thought and association, freedom to protest and freedom not to be tortured. Tyrannies, of course, have other ideas. Limitable freedom goes to the question of the balance of competing interests, such as protecting people from a pandemic that’s called more than five million people, versus what they see as their rights to maintain their way of life.

It’s understandable people want their lives back as they were, for everything to be reset as normal. It’s also understandable some are losing patience with the timeframe for this. But, on the other hand, there are many, many patients who no longer have a voice, or whose lives will never return to normal. Their universes will never be the same.