Politics clearly matters, but your personal impact on it pretty much does not. People have ceded their power to the point where most people don't get a say in almost any aspect of their lives. Most people work for someone else, pay taxes to someone else, and are governed by someone else. You get to vote, but you can't outvote the vast uninformed masses so the masses end up deciding that for you too.

The biggest mistake people make these day is being to quick to discount violence as a viable and effective means of political discourse. We've become docile, sheep-like people who hold ourselves "to a higher" standard than our masters hold themselves to, and this is why we have become so enslaved.