Camel Lot

By Ty dePass

An old Bedouin tale tells of a traveler who allowed his camel to slip its nose under the flap to share the warmth of his tent. As the man sleeps, a frigid desert wind beats upon the tent and he is suddenly awakened to find the camel’s head nuzzling his back. “Well,” he tells himself with a shrug, “it’s very cold out there and he doesn’t take that much room,” and dozes off again.

The night deepens, the wind rises, and the man is awakened again to find the camel’s forelegs pressing against him. “Oh, well, it’s a very, very cold and windy night” he sighed, rolling over to regard his guest. “Besides, there’s still plenty of room inside the tent.”

He falls into a fitful sleep, wakened frequently by the urgent nudgings of the camel, relentlessly inching its way into the tent until, eventually, the man wakes up shivering outside of the tent in the cold dawn—while the camel snores loudly from within.

The moral here is obvious: a kindness, once extended, might be turned to a disadvantage by an ungrateful recipient.

In everyday life, we’ve all experience the houseguest who overstays their welcome, or the co-worker or neighbor who presumes on our generosity to invade our space or borrow our tools, or the SUV driver in a hurry who usurps our right-of-way at the rotary… It’s nothing personal, they’re just scratching an itch—at our expense.

And as the post-election euphoria whips the nation into a pre-inaugural frenzy, the Bedouin’s story seems to capture the essential dynamics driving Mr. Obama’s transition appointments. Mr. Obama proposes expanding the Democratic tent to bringing in his “team of rivals,” drawn from the ranks of Washington insiders, well-connected neoliberal economic strategists, and unrepentant supporters of the war in Iraq.

The question for us is: after reaching across the aisle to an ever-more ideological GOP, wooing social conservative evangelicals, and placating corporate America, how much space is left for the millions who voted to end a war, eliminate poverty and disease, and restore a sense of justice and optimism for people who still remember the promise of Martin’s Dream? — Ω