It was my turn to get sick last week, right after returning from the Forward on Climate rally. It's almost a week later and I'm finally back to my computer, so the rally's old news, but I'll just add a few of my thoughts.

The numbers -- I think 35,000 was about right -- were inspiring and delighted the organizers, the Sierra Club and 350.org.

Speakers varied in their approach from saying climate activists "have Obama's back, and he has ours" to threatening that if he approves the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, that will be his shameful legacy, overshadowing any good "you have done, or will do" in the words of Van Jones.

Come to find out that while tens of thousands were passing by the White House with their demands, Obama was golfing in Florida with some fossil fuel tycoons. Since his administration has already approved the construction of the southern leg (generating some of the most courageous and creative non-violent resistance I've seen anywhere -- check out my interview with Glen Collins), it seems likely he'll approve the northern leg as well. In this post, Ralph Nader mentioned yet another reason Obama's likely to approve it: that Canada can sue the U.S.  under NAFTA regulations if he doesn't.

Most inspiring to me were some of the folks I met during the rally who have made the fight against climate change their life's work. Click on my In These Times story to read about them, including Gavan Uprichard and Dana McGuire, pictured at a coffee shop post-rally with their daughter. You can also check out my two latest Between the Lines posts, featuring a First Nations leader from Canada, Van Jones and Eleanor Fairchild, the 78-year-old Texas landowner who's stared down pipeline owner TransCanada's bulldozers on her property.

With the devastating evidence of the impacts of climate change piling up around us, I thought we might finally get some substantive action, but many in power are still insisting that business go on as usual. They have children and grandchildren too, and I just don't get why pleasing their political donors is more important than saving the Earth as we know it.  Many of the changes are already locked in place, but with more emphasis on efficiency and renewables (wind has been surging lately) we could still prevent the worst possible scenarios.

As Bill McKibben said at the rally, all he wanted was to see a climate movement, and now he's seen it.  Regardless of what Obama decides on the Keystone XL, I think those at the rally will be ramping up their activism, which is the only path worth following, even if it turns out to be too late.

Violence on my mind, since the Newtown massacre and all the grassroots and legislative responses...and since I interviewed Rita Nakashima Brock, the founding co-director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. She works with veterans suffering from "moral injury," which she defines as "the impact on a person's moral conscience and sense of being a moral self in relation to war service," which can come from actually having done something one might think is wrong but  also from doing one's duty in war and then returning home and beginning to think about the moral implications of war service.

And thinking about the young vet in Texas with PTSD who shot and killed two other vets who were taking him to a shooting range, perhaps for therapy, perhaps just for relaxation. And the former cop (also a veteran) in California who allegedly killed three people in retaliation for his firing. And beautiful 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, killed in a crossfire in Chicago right after participating in Obama's inauguration.

And the fact that many people joining the fight against gun violence are new to the issue, have lived secure lives in the suburbs and had no idea that over 30,000 Americans are killed by guns annually -- accidents, suicides and homicides (the latter are 12,000 of the total), committed mostly with hand guns, not assault rifles, mostly in the inner cities, and mostly by and against young African American males.

In 2011, the total was 31,672. The number killed in motor vehicle accidents that year was 33,687. But the latter are declining while the former are rising. Each of those numbers -- more than half of all the Americans killed in Vietnam, for example -- pass mostly without comment, as just the way "life is" in this country. Finally, both are being challenged, and it's about time.

The following is an excerpt from the Dec. 20, 2012 Fresh Air interview with Tom Diaz, author of The Last Gun and an analyst at the Violence Policy Center. (Thanks to the Hartford Catholic Worker newsletter for bringing it to my attention.)

"[I]f you take all of the Americans who have ever died in any terrorist attack that's been recorded, more Americans die every year from gunshot injury. Since September 11, 2001, we've spent several trillion dollars on so-called homeland security. We have made changes in our constitutional protections, particularly in the Fourth Amendment and the Fifth Amendment, against search and seizure and self-incrimination, that would have shocked people, shocked constitutional scholars, before 9/11. And yet we spend a tiny amount of money on public health concerning guns. We forbid [the 1994 assault weapons ban did] the Centers for Disease Control and Injury from actually researching gun safety. So we've started a war on terror. We have no war on guns."

So we've sent hundreds of thousands of men and women off to fight the "war on terror," while other Americans are being terrorized right here at home. And many of those returning from war are traumatized and in desperate need of help they can't get partly because that hasn't been a budget priority of the federal government -- not compared to the million bucks a year it costs to keep one soldier in Afghanistan. And the gun lobby is powerful enough, even after Newtown, to likely squelch most meaningful gun safety laws. ("Gun control" implies a revocation of rights; "gun safety" implies protection of innocents.)

Some politicians talk about a "sea change" since Newtown in the attitudes of some colleagues who were formerly hard-line NRA supporters, and grassroots activists say that newly engaged suburban moms will carry the day.  Pro-gun advocates say we just need to enforce existing laws and keep guns away from the mentally ill. Those with mental illness and the people who care for them worry that they'll take the fall for growing numbers of gun massacres, even though it's well-established that the former are much more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violence.  (The first-in-the-nation-law-post-Newtown, passed in New York, includes some such provisions.)

There seems to be a growing consensus -- including many NRA members, but not those at the top of the organization -- that universal background checks for all gun sales -- whether from a dealer, a gun show, or a private sale -- is a good idea.  Even if that could pass, with guns proliferating like the flu virus, I'm not optimistic about that leading to a major reduction in violence. I hope I'm wrong.