Today I have read for the first time the story from Laura Clawson in April 2015 entitled "Paul Ryan: Poor Kids should go hungry so they know they are loved." What Ryan says, and tries to pass off as a second-hand real story from Eloise Anderson, sounds suspiciously
almost exactly like the story from the non-fiction book An Invisible Thread by Laura Schroff. (http://www.amazon.com/...)
I have excerpted the entire passage so that readers can see the similarities, and realize the context of the real story which shows Ryan's distortion for his own purpose. The author gets to know a very poor child named Maurice on the streets of Manhattan and begins to care for him.
“Maurice, when was the last time you had something to eat?” I asked.
“Thursday,” he said - two days earlier.
It broke my heart…I knew he was enrolled in public school, for instance, but I didn’t really know for sure how he was eating during the day. But now I couldn’t avoid the harsh reality of his life — that much of the time he was hungry and had no real way to find food….
“Look, Maurice, I don’t want you out there hungry on the nights I don’t see you, so this what we can do. I can either give you some money for the week — and you'll have to be really careful how you spend it — or when you come over on Monday night we can go to the supermarket and I can buy you all the things you like to eat and make you lunch for the week. I’ll leave it with the door man and you can pick it up on the way to school.”
Maurice looked at me and asked me a question.
“If you make me a lunch,” he said, “will you put it in a brown paper bag?”
I didn’t really understand the question. “Do you want it in a brown paper bag?” I asked, “Or how would you prefer it?”.
“Miss Laura,” he said, “I don’t want your money. I want my lunch in a brown paper bag.”
“Okay, sure. But why do you want it in a bag?”
“Because when I see kids come to school with their lunch in a paper bag, that means someone cares about them. Miss Laura, can I please have my lunch in a paper bag?”
I looked away when Maurice said that, so he wouldn’t see me tear up. A simple brown bag, I thought.
To me, it meant nothing. To him, it was everything.
How abominable it is to plagiarize someone else's true story and twist its meaning to go against the original.
Refer to Clawson's original article here: http://www.dailykos.com/...