I'm Nate Marshall and this is The Slow Down.

Do you remember those early flickering days of the pandemic?

I do, though it is a blur now.

I remember canceling a trip to a professional conference in early March, not because I was

feeling particularly cautious, but because every one of my half dozen events at the conference

had been canceled by other people pulling out.

I remember saying goodbye to students at the opening of a freshly elongated spring break

and feeling upbeat, but unsure.

But first, it just seemed like a little extra time off.

I remember early on when it was suggested that we wear some kind of facial covering, but

refrain from panic buying medical masks and a colleague happily relayed his use of bandanas

and the roguish feeling it gave him.

I remember telling him in one way or another that I was hesitant to wear anything of the

sort, given that my relative color and size tend to make me the kind of body who might

be too easily misunderstood as threatening should I arrive in a place of business band

danit up.

I remember his clumsy but sincere apology and the myriad of other clumsy but perhaps sincere

apologies that flooded my phone after the catalyzing moment of George Floyd's murder

and the subsequent uprisings.

Today's palm is about a different pandemic, the Bolivirus, but it is also about how these

moments of disease and pathogen reveal the other less physical forms of sickness that we

live with in our human societies.

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