Bus advertising instills fear

To the editor:

What follows is a letter I sent to the MTA and FX Network:

My wife and I would like to alert you to what one of your bus advertisements has done to my six year old son. Yesterday, while we were driving up Riverdale Avenue, he caught sight of your revolting ad for the FX show “The Strain” on a Bx7 bus. 

(The ad included an image of a human eye with a worm crawling out of it.) This frightened my little boy beyond words and he began to cry in terror.  

He spent the rest of the day crying, saying he could not get the image out of his mind. We felt helpless, as there was very little we could do other than comfort him, reassure him and remind him that it was just a cartoon drawing.

We have begun a petition to have this removed and to raise awareness among advertisers that our neighborhood is a home to thousands of small children, whose imaginations are still fragile and developing.  

Furthermore, this type of imagery in public settings takes away our rights as parents to censor what our children see.  

Perhaps you will be more considerate and thoughtful about what you inflict on our community in the future, but something tells me the sensibilities and innocence of children won’t matter to you, especially when a big payday is on the line. 

With disgust,

Brian B. Pinter