A Newborn Is Thrown in the Trash and Dies

A Newborn Thrown in the Trash and Dies is a thought provoking, gut wrenching tale about an infant who is born to a teenage mother that lives in a housing project in New York and is thrown down the trash, down ten floors to thecompactor chute to its death. The story is narrated by the unnamed infant who is the subject of the story. She is the sympathetic character as she describes her projected lifehas horrible as her certain death. She doesn’t seem bitter about dying, she feels sympathy for the mother who put her in the trash and accepts her life as being â€Å"how it is,† as she doesn’t know any better. As she passes each floor she shares the peek that she is given, from learning that people talk out of both sides of their mouths, political power, her molestation, and even the death of her brother. The infant almost gives the reader the idea that her life will be just as tragic as her death and wouldn’t change anything. She would just be one of many stories published in the paper. She believes that a Russian on the other side of the world is going through the same thing, that even though they are from different countries they have poverty in common. This is true today, we hear horrible stories about things that happen to children and the people of the city have become numb to its affects. For example, children are abducted from the city all of the time and it is reported, right after the story the news anchors switches gears and gives the weather as if they were not affected by what they have just reported. It seems that it is as easy to them as reporting rain or a traffic jam, they seem unaffected which is conveys to the listening audience. Those of us who are affected will be for a short time, but not enough to where we will feel that we need to do something about it. Life will continue to go on as it always has and stories like these will continue to occur. The story makes me question what I have become numb to and what do I consider normal. When I watch the news I almost expect to see where someone is murdered in the city. What is wrong with me, us, society? The story describes that there have been nine babies discarded in 1990 and as of August of the following year seven discarded babies were discovered. How ironic is it that the name of her housing project where she is born and dies is called the Gerald J. Carey Gardens. A garden is a place where seeds are planted, nurtured and tended, the total opposite of what was happening to her.