You're playing American Democracy wrong.

You work through your Representative. This requires patience, diligence, and a superhuman capacity to sink disappointment.

Occasionally though, you will see verbiage from one of your letters end up in a bill. So it does work.

We should probably stop using 18th century political technology to manage 21st century problems. Eventually we'll need to move towards a participative form of democracy, a wikiocracy if you will, in which anyone can be legislator and work on any topic, substantive or trivial, but will need to overcome a certain amount of social inertia and semi-automated procedural brakes.

Right now you have an electorate mostly equipped with near-instant communication and responsive to mass information campaigns, governed by a legislature that works at a snail's pace, lacking in adequate transparency, and with no direct linkage between the popular will and the legislative process; effectively a large complex machine which voters are given a limited right to kick every 2-4 years in hopes that this will rearrange the internals enough to make it functional. Individual congresses and executive branch administrations can be good or bad to varying degrees, but the system as a whole is simply not adequate for the governance of the society and economy that has grown up around it.

Hey don’t knock. I recently found myself trapped in a bureaucratic hellscape that literally drove me to tears.

One to my Senator and it all instantly vanished.