Dear Editor,

Payton Patterson’s December 5 letter ‘Children don’t raise themselves’ brought to my mind a relatively new Oreo TV commercial, one that makes light, with smiles, of a pubescent-looking boy’s black eye. The bruised boy’s little brother gets him to smile after holding a dark-brown Oreo cookie to his own eye.

The viewers, being potential product consumers, are given no clue as to the actual cause of the conspicuous bruise. Still, I really didn’t get the impression that the boy had received the ring-around-the-eye bruise from an accident.

Was the boy hit by another boy, as I believe the viewers are supposed to presume? If so, does that make it socially and, therefore, ideologically/politically acceptable? Or was he supposedly assaulted by an older sibling or even a parent? Or slugged by a girl, be she a friend, girlfriend, or school-peer bully?

Nowadays commercials get cancelled at the drop of the figurative hat, or at least edited, when they offend vocal, thus influential, segments of the viewership. Yet this anti-male, violence-accepting commercial in our supposedly enlightened times continues to be broadcast unchanged. Really, what does this say about us collectively?

Frank Sterle Jr

British Columbia, Canada

fgsjr2010@hotmail.com