Do you ever feel that everything political is futile?
From a citizen's standpoint.
Sorta-kinda, but not entirely.
Elections do matter. The changes are often subtle and hard to see in the short term, but it can make a difference.
Within my own lifetime, I felt like the 70s were an out of control, chaotic decade where we were on an utterly wrong trajectory... but we managed to make a course correction and avoid doing a Titanic, by a narrow margin.
Not to say we were then on the straight and narrow... no we weren't. We dodged an iceberg but we were still in high seas and taking on water.
Things stabilized somewhat as we went into the 90s, and that's good since we didn't know 9/11 was coming... a demarcation line, watershed moment that changed a lot of things. The moment when we realized all that stuff "over there" could suddenly show up "over HERE" in a big way, even if we were mostly minding our business at the moment.
We could have responded better, we could have done worse. On the whole lets just say we navigated that decade without major disaster and with less suffering that might have been the case.
This decade we seem to be drifting with the wind and tide.... the engines are barely turning on the Ship of State, and half the time it feels like no one is manning the helm (or else spinning it at random). The next election or two may determine how far off course we drift, and how long it will take to resume a safe and prosperous course and heading...
So yeah, elections matter. But on the other hand, we hear so much BS, so much "positioning" and "strategy", and so little honesty or real statesmanship, that it seems nearly futile at times. With both parties putting up crappy same-old candidates and ideas, our choices seem limited.
And in things like arguing on DP, even though I know sometimes opinions do change it is so rare it also seems futile much of the time. Much of the time, neither side is even really listening to the other, just talking past each other.
Depends on what day you ask I suppose.