Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

There is a network called Tru TV on cable, which basically gets most of its material from the world around us. Security cameras, random passersby with video capabilities on their phones, and cameras that are attached to police cars all contribute to the 24 hours per day of reality programming over on Tru TV.

The shows have titles like “World’s Wildest Police Chases” and “World’s Wildest Vacations.” In other words, it’s mostly real life footage of criminals getting chased down or bad things happening to people. We aren’t necessarily fans, mainly because we see enough bad things happen to people through the course of our work as personal injury lawyers in Maryland, D.C. and Virginia. But in the event that the folks over at Tru TV experience a sudden drought of terrifying real-life video footage, we recommend that they head on over the headquarters of the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA for short, Metro for those of us who live in the Washington, D.C. area.) All they would have to do is take a look at the footage of the driver’s-view cameras that are mounted on every Metro Bus and they would have enough for at least half a season’s worth of television.

There is a pedestrian being hit by a Metro bus. There are dozens of near-misses. There is an SUV getting rear-ended. There are collisions in school zones with children nearby. There are red light violations. There are reckless right turns. There are stop signs that might as well have not been there at all. There are bicyclists almost getting hit. All told, there are 134 video clips of near misses, and dozens involving people or cars getting actually hit by busses.

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Did you know that there is a group called the Flat Earth Society? We’re serious. They exist. They are a group who sincerely believe that the planet on which we dwell is as flat as a pancake. They believe this despite hundreds of years of evidence to the contrary. They believe this despite photographic evidence, the laws of physics, latitude and longitude and all the other facts that verify with all the certainty in the world that the world is in fact round.

Don’t bother trying to convince them otherwise. They believe that all the evidence is fake. They believe that the credentials of all of these so-called “experts” and “scientists” are overstated, and that this belief is just part of a big money making conspiracy. (We aren’t sure who would profit by making people believe the earth is round, or how they would profit, but this is the belief.) They also always manage to find the one guy with a science degree who actually agrees with them, and they trot him out as their expert.

As crazy as the Flat Earth Society sounds, there are actually a great many corporations who have found their example to be purely inspirational. Tobacco companies, for instance, were denying for decades the harmfulness of its products. They claimed nicotine was not addictive and that smoking was only a habit, and further claimed that it wasn’t really that bad for you. And they always asked questions like these: “Who are these so-called ‘experts’ who were linking tobacco to lung cancer? What is their real agenda? How can we trust them? But in the meantime, here is a scientist that we found who disputes everything all the other scientists say about nicotine. So the facts are still out on the so-called ‘harmfulness’ of tobacco.

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There is a strange phenomenon that happens quite often in this country. Whenever a new device or technology is made available that could potentially reduce deaths and/or injuries, the people responsible for implementing that technology do everything possible to try to get out of it.

A good example of that would be airbags. These devices come standard in most of the cars that are for sale today, and having them in cars has saved countless lives. It should have been a no-brainer to put them in cars, especially considering that airbag technology existed as far back as 1970.

But Ford fought the implementations of airbags bitterly, and went so far as to meet with President Richard Nixon to demand that any new regulations requiring airbags would be delayed. Even General Motors, who practically invented airbags in cars, decided to delay mandatory airbag installation.

When they presented their anti-airbag arguments to the public, Ford’s line of argument was that, according to their research, the public didn’t want airbags in their cars, and who were they to “force” such things on their customers?

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