For the past few decades, Americans, and especially college-educated professionals, have been sold a distorted view of politics that essentially amounts to watching sports.

Most of us have never seen a working example of democracy. We have just sort of tacitly accepted a kind of benevolent dictatorship in most institutions, from our workplace to open-source (and please correct me if I'm wrong here, I know that there is a kind of democracy in forking and collaboration, but as I understand it, voting democracy isn't really found anywhere.)

I was just watching Car 54 where are you? the other night, and in it, you can see the members of a fictional police union voting on absolutely everything, from union dues, to where to host the christmas dinner. People voted, made speeches, and ran for office, and all of this within like a tiny local. This kind of general participatory democracy seems as quaint as the black and white film it's played on.

My advice to you is to join something. There's a number of civics activists trying to push for some local issue, like transit, or housing, or raising funds for a local hospital; all else failing, you could always volunteer for your local party and get to know the candidate. It's a really good salve to that feeling of general powerlessness.

Then, instead of feeling powerless, you'll know you're mostly powerless, but at the very least, you won't be alone.

In the Netherlands, a petition was required to force a national referendum. Online or offline doesn't matter. You needed to reach some percentage of the Dutch population in signatures, I'm not sure about the exact number, but they did and we had a referendum on mass surveillance and people voted against.

That's when the government decided these things are kind of a nuisance and abolished the whole concept of referenda, even advisory as they were

I love the ruling party

But anyway petitions aren't necessarily useless, also for media attention on a topic if it goes well