Danny D.

I came to know Danny D. when we were accepted in the Presidential Management Staff, Office of the President (PMS-OP) during the time of President Cory Aquino.

Since we got in at almost the same time, we trained together along with a handful of other recruits.

It was just a couple of years into the Presidency of Mrs. Corazon Aquino and People Power fever was still strong. In fact it was the honor of working under President Cory's administration that lured most of us to work in the PMS, an office mainly tasked to attend and service the official needs of the President beyond what was provided by the line departments and special offices. Admittedly, the mandate and functions of our office at that time were on the vague side, but it was in this vagueness wherein lay its vast potential influence and power.

What I remembered of Danny D. was that he was then a fresh graduate of La Salle University but was already married with two kids. He had a healthy sense of humor but spoke softly. He had a La Sallean idealism with him and he believed in People Power, or his idea of it.

But Danny D. never made it through training.

Maybe because he believed that the government under President Aquino would be different that he thought it should be doing right. Thus, when he saw something that did not seem to be right, he asked a question out loud in one of the offices he was sent to for training.

He noticed that during meetings, the office he was training in tend to over order food much more than what meeting participants could consume. After the meeting, the staff would then partake of the excess food. Since this was what he saw, he asked if it was right to do so.

For this simple question, he became a pariah among the office staff and all directors deemed him to be a potential troublemaker. Some of the directors were holdovers from the past administration and some were new. Not one of the directors though would take Danny in and so effectively, he had nowhere to go after the training and had to leave.

This was a silent injustice that Danny D. faced alone in the administration of a President he admired and wished to serve - but because of a simple innocent question, he lost his chance.

I could not do anything for Danny D. then. All I could do was not to forget and by writing about it now, I stand as witness. I believe it is my duty to do so - not to get justice for him but to give him comfort in the knowledge that there was a person who saw the wrong done to him and who believed that this wrong should not be visited on others.

Some people may think what happened to Danny D. was trivial, but his story partly explains to me why despite the saintly personality of President Aquino, our country never got out from the grip of anomalies, corruption and poverty.

We changed a President, but we did not change as a people.