censorship of the worst kind

       My husband has a special fondness for comics which is one of the contradictions I love about him... since he considers himself an intellectual.  It's only after some time that I've come to understand this contradiction.
       He started reading when he was very young and he'd read anything he could get his hands on.  Keep in mind that he grew up in a very poor family in a small town in a coffee growing region of Colombia.  Life was tough, and to make matters worse, the region he lived in was being affected by La Violencia.  Seriously, there was a decade (about 1948-1957) in Colombia where the violence between "liberales" and "conservadores" was so wide-spread and intense that it's known as "The Violence."
       For a time when he was young he lived with an Aunt because his parents were off trying to get settled in a new, larger and safer city. He had a comic book collection because he had saved what little money he could get his hands on to accumulate these comics, and, if I'm not mistaken, they had even been a source of income for him; he could rent them to other children.
       Anyway, this Aunt was very religious and disapproved of the comics.  One day when he came home, he saw that she had taken his comics and cut them up for toilet paper. 
Just to allow you to complete the necessary mental image:
       Naturally people didn't purchase toilet paper in a poor family back then.  The family would cut whatever paper they could use into small squares which were  then skewered onto a thick wire hook (or a pole) with a pointed end.  This was kept near the toilet.
       I can imagine his frustration and rage.  I know he was quite a handful as an adolescent, but I suspect this was before the time when he basically started making his own life decisions. . . which was pretty young by his account.
       So, it's no accident that he has little tolerance for the type of closed-minded fearful censorship that comic books and similar reading can awaken in adults (He and I often disagree about what's appropriate - and I've been much more liberal about what my youngest son sees/reads because of that).  And it's also pretty predictable that, in spite of a general lack of interest in material things, it's hard for him not to accumulate books and comics/graphic novels.  It's a fun passtime, too - because mainly it involves searches through garage sales and used bookstores.

       Anyway, back to the past, his aunt had little respect for his reading, but others did.   I have to add an anecdote I heard about my husband which was really an AHA moment for me.   My mother in law had come and we were sitting around with family and friends from his childhood (we were visiting Florida).  One of the things that my mother in law said was that, for a while my husband suffered from headaches as a boy.  Well, her remedy involved TYING A PIECE OF RAW BEEF TO HIS HEAD.  Isn't that fantastic?  You know that she cooked it afterward.... Well, I didn't ask her (it seemed indelicate) but, seriously, she couldn't really throw away meat like that I'm thinking.
       But the point of this story is that, when the other mothers saw that H had beef tied to his head, they started tying beef to their children's heads!
       Since neighbors and family would see him reading newspapers when he was super young - I guess everyone knew that he was the smartest kid around.  If a piece of meat tied to the head was good enough for H, well.... You get the picture.  I just love this image.