Operation Merienda: Reflections on Development in a Digital Future

When I think about the innovative mechanisms of global civics that I am trying to fulfil through Operation Merienda, I think of the histories of objectification that reduces the story of a people to a narrow understanding of suffering. Of a people in need of saving. Of a people objectified to a past without any acknowledgement of their capacities in the present. Development, like the state of education today, operates in a disinterested and transactional way. The measure of radical progressive impact in my work through Operation Merienda may appear as an endeavor drenched in heightened idealism. I say this because one can probe further and question my meaning when it comes to understanding abstract concepts like love and joy. But these are objectives that do not require much explanation. What I aim to demonstrate here is that the prescriptions of happiness are not solely based on monetary capacity. Rather, the human experience is an action of co-creating social realities that defy the narratives of suffering assigned by mainstream ideologies which paint complex stories of resilience and value as null in service of an oversimplified fiction.

For example, the recent elections that elected Bong Bong Marcos (BBM) are swallowed by the narratives of uninformed citizenry voting to surrender their thriving democracy to the son of a former dictator who was ousted in a People’s Power Revolution in 1986. Since most of my work in the Philippines operates in the SOCCSKSARGEN region that overwhelmingly supported BBM’s rise to power, the sentiments are typically aligned with the idea that their vote in this election is an investment in prolonging the Duterte reign, which enabled massive infrastructure projects in the rural south for the last six years (Build Build Build Program). As someone who spent a portion of my childhood in this region, I can attest that these sentiments do hold water because I’ve seen these developments unfold before my eyes. The airport in General Santos has been renovated anew, the roads in indigenous areas are brand new, and our small town of Sto. Nino has seen significant developments. Most importantly, the investments in human infrastructure in this administration has supported policies that made college more accessible to the poor.

What is interesting to me is the observation that a lost election of former Vice President Robredo, is reeling in a mainstream media coverage that is loosely similar to the Trump Administration’s agenda when faced with defeat. There are numerous stories swirling of election fraud, the rosy picture of Robredo as an “angel” and “ideal candidate” dominates the headlines, and the fatalist ideology that assumes a BBM/SARA tenure is a “sure path to a backsliding democracy”. What is interesting to note here is that there is evidence that suggests that historical revisionism of Marcos’ Martial Law regime helped the campaign that is complicit in promoting those twenty years as a “Gilded Age”. Even though this was only true for the very few that held power at that time. The coverage seems to promote mostly the views of Filipino “intellectuals” who navigate the halls of elite academia. As someone who also exists on the periphery as a woman of color in an Ivy League institution in the US, I can appreciate how there are instances when being of lesser means can equate to a devaluation of one’s voice in the mainstream. So the radical idea in this attempt to promote cultural exchange and global civics is positioned in these social realities that suggests that the process of learning and co-creating requires a radical way of seeing the world. Beyond the monetary currency that connotes power by highlighting the talents and capacities for social entrepreneurship that I’ve experienced from Filipinos who have historically been placed on the periphery of their very own political realities. But of course, I am just one person with an incomplete view of a story. The point is that there is another side of a story.

I’ve been very careful not to frame my work in Operation Merienda as the one venture that would solve the biggest problems. Operation Merienda will not solve world hunger. Operation Merienda will not save people from poverty. Operation Merienda will not cure anything, but the hope is that it will make a dent in the world. To promise a solution will objectify the humanizing process I am trying to accomplish here. What it will do is show another side of the story. I want it to show that there are cultural values that could be transferable to our realities here. That there are cultural possibilities that exist in the periphery that are worth highlighting. That there are people in the world that achieve the American Dream and do their best to universalize this dream of progress to underserved pockets of the world. That there are forms of radical activism made possible by technological tools that give power to regular people like me to challenge the foundation of ideologies that hold our collective humanity captive to these single stories. To be critical does not mean one only sees deficiencies, but the hope is that it illuminates the capacities of cultural realities beyond our own.

Ideologies are inherently reactionary. They are reactionary in the sense that they are built on the foundation concerned with the anxieties of an upcoming historical shift. Whether these shifts are in technology, education, labor industry, human infrastructure, sustainability efforts, or politics, the waves of change are almost always divided along ideological lines promoted as eternal truths. Radical progressivism understands that one cannot stop history but can only make calculations of the future in order to determine the tasks towards progress that must be fulfilled in the present. This also goes with the understanding, of course, that sometimes the aim to change the future for the better may have inadvertent consequences.

If philanthropy means a love of people, perhaps we can recalibrate the way we think of global civics. The hope is that we can push the narrative on philanthropy to be more inclusive, and more open to creative methods of social uplift. In a world full of possibilities, perhaps we can make space for narratives that demonstrate empowerment, love, and equality in a way that is truly radical and universalizable. And I think this starts from the heart with an understanding that small changes to our ways of seeing the world water the plants of human flourishing.

And one simply cannot flourish without the joys of food and sugar.

Sugar makes the world go round, after all.