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One of the oldest legends in history is the story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who appear just before some great catastrophe, as a warning to all the world. From time immemorial, the Four Horsemen have stood for War, Famine, Pestilence and Death. Today, in these apocalyptic times, the Four Horsemen appear before hobbyists as completely different entities. The first Horseman as determined by the hobbyist/collector is the archaeologist. He is very jealous of anything old and believes that everything should be discovered by and recovered by him. He has also been known to occasionally have a collection of wonderful finds hidden down in his personal basement. The archaeologist is the only horseman that I feel has any right to dissuade our hobby. He is one who should be tolorated because his work is actually needed. However, but he is an overachiever. It is "all or nothing" for him and you know which one of those he preaches. The second Horseman is the enviromentalist. He covets everything green (or brown, or grey). He is also known as a Tree-hugger, and for good reason. The fact that he loves all things that he attributes to Nature, is heightened by his fight to keep everyone else from them. Floria and fauna alike are his religion. No one else should ever touch his precious treasures and that means no detecting, no prospecting, no off-roading, no hunting no fishing and no anything else. The third Horseman is the vote - crazed politician. This animal will do anything that he believes will gain him one more vote. Consequently, he caters to the "Greenies" and the "Archies" to gain their respect and he bad-mouths the poor hobbiest He is power - hungry and will sell his soul for a vote. May the Powers That Be cast him to the deepest, darkest abyss for his beliefs. The final Horseman is the most fearsome. To paraphrase Pogo’s theorem, "We have seen the enemy and they is us." Oh yes it is! We leave holes with trash beside them. We jump fences and go onto property when we know it is verboten. We leave gates open. And if we are of the Chosen Few that don't do these things, we are the ones who don't chastise the guilty parties. Consequently, we create ill will with almost everyone and then cry and gnash our teeth and wail because not everyone loves us. Now, let us digress just a bit. Sometime ago, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University conducted a study. In it, subjects watched a video of two teams of three people--one team in white shirts, the other wearing black-- passing a basketball among themselves. Some subjects were told to count the number of passes by either the black or the white team. Others were told to keep separate mental counts of bounce Passes and aerial passes. During the video, a woman carrying an umbrella walks through the scene of basketball passes. Another version shows a woman in a full gorilla suit walking through the teams. In a third video, the gorilla stops in the middle of the scene, thumps its chest, and walks off. Amazingly, only 54 percent of the subjects saw the umbrella woman or the gorilla in the first two versions, and just 50 per cent saw the gorilla in the third version!" People concentrating on one task do not see something unrelated because they aren’t expecting it. The intuition people have is that something different will jump out at them and they will notice it. But their intuition is wrong." It’s no stretch to apply the same thinking to metal detector hobbyists. They are so involved in their hobby that they simply don’t see the gorilla. And, in our case, they are so intent on blaming and cursing the first three Horsemen that they can't see the forth, and most devistating one, ourselves. In short folks, we simply must clean up our act if we want to continue this wonderful hobby. Otherwise, the great catastrophe shall befall us and it shall happen in the very near future.
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