Up Close and Personal with F. Sionil Jose

(The following article is reprinted from a lecture given by Filipino National Artist, F. Sionil Jose.)

The best way--perhaps the only way--to start any discussion is to define the terms we use. This is not to obfuscate a discourse, even lengthen it so that we get lost in labyrinthine definitions. Rather, it is to be lucid and precise about the limits, the substance of the subject under discussion, specify its essence, its core.

The term social justice is all embracing, almost limitless because we append the word "social" to justice which we know is not an abstraction, particularly in our country. Social meaning every aspect that pertains to being sociable, or being up there in the upper classes?

Let me define injustice then as we in this unhappy country know it--rather than justice.

If social justice pertains to society, to a community and its institutions, then injustice is the absence of justice in that society. We are familiar with it: when a man cannot have three meals a day, that is unjust. When a sick Filipino--with all our nurnses and doctors and excellent modern hospitals dies because he cannot afford medicines or medical services--that is injustice. When a person is jailed or is sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, when children cannot go to school, because parents cannot afford to send them there, these are injustices.

In 1986 when twenty farm demonstrators were killed in Mendiola because a President refulsed to see them, when farmer demonstrators are shot at the gates of Hacienda Luisita--and there is no outrage agains that crime--when a jobless man feeds his two children with recycled garbage and they die, when thousands of our college graduates word abroad as housemaids, or even as prostitutes.

All these are injustices that cry for redress.

Having defined social injustice, it is easy then for us define the opposite, which is justice and media--meaning television, radio, newspapers and all the latest technologies that purvey information. But there is something awry about the connective, "and"--media and social justice should be a partnership? Between media and a just society? Man and wife. Business and pleasure? Partners and crime, perhaps?

I would rather that the title be Media FOR Social Justice. This would mean advocacy, even a commitment, if that is at all possible, to social justice.