Last week, the Saskatchewan RCMP announced it had charged Carievale area resident Michael Gordon Jackson with one count of abduction in contravention of custody or a parenting order. Investigators also obtained a Canada-wide warrant for his arrest as he's been withholding his seven-year-old daughter Sarah Jackson, who the RCMP is also trying to find, since November.
As it turned out by abducting the child, Michael wants to "protect" her from vaccination.
While social media is buzzing about the need for an Amber Alert and discussing how freaky that move is, unfortunately, this story is not unique nonsense and rather illustrates a greater problem we are facing.
Society is split. COVID and everything that came with it split us pretty deeply, and the break keeps growing and deepening, as it spreads over from life around us into our families, and from parents to children.
The Jackson family example turned vocal and resonating, but I'm sure that it's one of the many of this kind. In this case, a former family broke apart over their attitude towards COVID vaccination. I know at least one other full family, where a kid also got caught in a vaccine crossfire and has to live with it.
A friend of mine, eager anti-COVID-19-vaxxer until the mid-last year when he changed his mind and took both shots, has his teen daughter aggressively advocating against the vaccine now. He'd share his thoughts on the injection early on, reproducing some of those stories that were and still are circulating the web. And kids are like sponges; they absorb the information spilled on them.
They can't resist the information going deep into them, even when they don't fully understand it. Especially when the information comes from parents. So now that kid lives with the confidence that the world, the system and what's even worse, her mother, are trying to harm her by suggesting that she takes a shot to protect herself and others from getting sick.
In the case of Sarah Jackson, her mother Mariecar says she first had no idea why her ex was withholding the kid. Not until he appeared on a podcast and stated that it was his way to save his daughter from COVID-19 vaccine. We don't know how the situation was in their family before November, but when asked about why she doesn't want to get vaccinated during the show, Sarah said she believes vaccine "can change your DNA and I don't believe God wants me to and it can make you sick and kill you," according to CTV News Regina.
I assume the father's intentions probably were the best, but there is a saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It all went too far. Now, when they will be eventually found and the kid will be reunited with her mother, it won't be about taking a shot or not, it will be about overcoming what could be a serious trauma. It will be about trying to learn how to trust. It will be about dealing with so much of what no seven-year-old should ever have to deal with.
And I'm sure there are many many more stories of this kind, where parents and children are quietly struggling, caught in this new social divide.
I've always advocated for vaccination. Once the COVID shots were approved, I've advocated for doing the research and triple-checking sources of information rather than listening to misinformation and disinformation, for talking to family doctors, to specialists that you know and trust their expertise, and for making an informed choice. For me, that informed choice was taking a shot, which I truly believe is (or at least was, before the virus started mutating and escaping immunity) a way to get back to normal and which has been proven to do less harm to my health than experiencing a full-power virus attack.
To be fair talks about the global conspiracies and unknown poison being injected into people's bodies, at some point gave me an eye tick (at that time there already was more than enough peer-reviewed scientific articles of all kinds from different countries that answered all questions discussed), I never believed that just putting a wall between the vaccinated and unvaccinated would do any good. Yes, it does feel unfair that despite doing all they can to stop the pandemic people still face restrictions, potential lockdowns and virus mutations, because of other people's (who are in a minority, with less than 20 per cent of the eligible population still unvaccinated in Canada) choices, but in my world, we all remain humans and we should treat each other like ones.
Those opposing vaccination and/or mandates state that it's the governments imposing those regulations that break people apart. On the other hand, an Ipsos poll published Jan. 24 and conducted exclusively for Global News shows that the majority of Canadians support more COVID restrictions for unvaccinated as a faster path to normal life. Sounds like a no-win game.
And unfortunately, I don't have an answer as to how we can overcome this divide. But I know that we have to find a way.
