and not worry about things like national politics, which I cannot effect, correct?
Analyzing and worrying are two different things. If you must worry, at least worry about the right things for the right reasons.
major world crises, time-sensitive world crises, that have to be solved on a global level or not at all.
Son, my grandfather was born a poor peasant in rural China in 1934. He ran away from home at age 14 to escape starvation. He's lived through the Warlord Era (which officially ended in 1928, but in reality continued until 1949), the Second Sino-Japanese War (which became part of WWII), the Chinese Civil War, the Korean War (in which he was a 16-year-old "People's Volunteer"), Mao's Anti-Rightist campaigns, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the struggle against the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms (which were devastating to many in the 1980's), the Tiananmen Square protests, and more.
Today, he's 80 years old and gets up every day loving life. Your grandfather probably experienced less hardship, but still orders of magnitude more than you have. What exactly is worth your worry?
There's a Chinese idiom, 杞人忧天, meaning "to worry about the sky falling down". The story goes that a man from the ancient kingdom of Qi was so worried everyday about the sky falling, or the earth swallowing him up, that he could neither eat nor sleep until his friend pointed out his folly. Don't be the man from Qi.
If we're going to work off your premise that what really sets policy is a set of powerful special interests, the role I'd REALLY like out of my government is that of an impartial, unbiased, unbought referee.
I think there's an old saying that only God is impartial, everyone else is a partisan. Or something like that; I really don't know my Christian proverbs.
"Government" is not a monolithic entity, though it may appear that way sometimes. None of the laws that we currently live under, from the Bill of Rights to your vehicle's MPG, was created out of "impartiality". People who believed in these things fought for them in legislatures and courts, and sometimes on battlefields, for months, years, or perhaps even generations. They gathered allies, converted people to their cause, created and led disciplined organizations, and persevered until they achieved their goals.
This is what separates great men and women in history from keyboard jockeys like you and I. We can clickety-clack all day, whining about this, worrying about that, being enraged by something or another, and go to sleep knowing we have not moved the world one iota.
When I say that you should worry about local politics, I mean that you should acknowledge the reality that big things are made of little things. If you can effect change in your city council, you might do something for your county, then your state, then your region, and finally your country. Chance are you won't make it that far, but anyone who's ever done anything did it this way. You can worry about DC all you like, but like the man from Qi worry about heaven, it just ain't in your realm of possibility to do anything about it.