ALMOST a year after we included in our May 2020 picks-of-the-month list Supakit Kulchartvijit's Pantry of Sharing project in Thailand, we see ourselves now picking for our April 2021 list Ana Patricia Non's similar social sculpture for the Philippine context.

    You heard us right, a similar initiative for the Philippine context. Which is quite a unique context, the obvious uniqueness of which can’t escape the eye of even the sloppiest semiotician. For although Kulchartvijit’s Pantry of Sharing and Non’s Maginhawa Community Pantry both seem to have patterned their systems (consciously or not) after the community fridges of the past in other parts of the world, or particularly after Little Free Pantries and Blessing Boxes, or more likely after the Feb 2020-launched Friendly Fridges project at the start of some US cities’ differently-scheduled lockdowns, or perhaps Hubbub UK’s earlier 2017 community fridge initiative, . . . Maginhawa’s entry still stands out as having a more interesting context, one that almost overwhelmed its significance in the sphere of mutual aid.
    Context, we said. Well, first, there’s the difference regarding an interested population. The number of people who would line up at a fridge in a US city district, for instance, would likely be incredibly less than the number of people who would do the same at a similar food pantry in a Philippine barangay (put aside the fact that many of these American visitors at a community fridge would be dropping by with their cars). And how many garden-friendly Thais did line up at those Pantry of Sharing outlets compared to the number that showed up at the latest Maginhawa Community Pantry-inspired community pantry in your own barangay?
    And while on-welfare shame, or the social stigma of being a recipient of state or private charity, has always been a factor in many US districts that have been trying hard to attract and get more beneficiaries to line up for their share of the community’s generosity (a shame factor US Republicans would like to ignore in their never-ending campaign to defund welfare), shamelessness is conversely quite the recurrent motif in Philippine community events when liberally guarded (the pantries here have to be guarded, like a warehouse food bank!). Anecdotal evidence abound. Is this because many of us have through the decades been limiting our kabaitan and Christianity to family and friends, and have automatically been regarding the community as a whole as our family’s competition?
    But the more obvious difference, the difference that you and I would now certainly be quite informed about, was Non’s pantry’s having been amply politicized. Sure, the US pandemic community fridges had some political overtones to them, too, given the partisan animosity that went on and on at that time regarding the release of stimulus packages, but at least the food pantries themselves did not become an element in these ideologic shit-slinging meetings (they weren’t targeted in, say, Fox News by Trump’s Ayn Rand-reading “parasites”-wary individualist Christian partisans). Now, some would aver that it was Non who started this politicization of her pantry project when she blurted out sentences to a media interviewer against the government’s supposed lack of imagination in coming up with more efficient solutions for mitigating the effects of the furloughs during the Philippines’ many-named (many-acronymed) lockdowns. This, coupled with a photo of her sporting a raised fist. . . . But if one is to widen one’s judgments and include the many instances in the world that would influence Non’s feelings of frustration, one might be gifted with the ability to say that the problem (along with its public solutions) was already politicized from the git-go, even before private solutions like hers started to come in. Add to that, there came the mixed messaging from the president’s big tent government, initially presided over by a not-so-funny red-baiting culture that aimed its verbal guns against Non and some other community pantry initiators, a messaging that went on forever until the President’s national security adviser announced a supposed gag order against an army general and a cabinet undersecretary who were spearheading the red-baiting against Non and some others. Incidentally, in the Philippines the word for it is red-tagging, which at best assumes the consequences that come with the tagging. The tag is sublimely seen as a quiet signal, then. In other countries the word is red-baiting, which clearly implies that the act is a loud effort to bait someone or some people into doing something against or toward the subject of the conversation.
    Now, let us assume, for the sake of argument, that many of these community pantries were indeed initiated by apologists of radical leftism (forget for the moment that our present civilian government has been the one touting itself as the party most accommodating to the Chinese Communist Party's need for appeasement). But a more savvy PR firm would certainly advise that the ruling party would do well to appropriate the popular initiative instead of go on about endlessly demonizing it. It would seem that the Duterte government’s messaging here failed to learn from the Aquino government’s answers to the complaints against the laglag-bala scam of 2015, that scam where others designed solutions-to-come against it while Noynoy Aquino’s government went on about denying the problem was real before launching a serious investigation on the MIAA being run by Aquino’s manager-cousin. So, for this round at least, our assumed-as-of-the-left-for-the-sake-of-argument community pantry organizers came out the winner in the eyes of the involved public, their demonizers seen as merely the equivalent of Myanmar’s despised China-backed military.