Options? Your input appreciated.

You don’t need to be an investor or some Wall Street savant to understand what’s happening in the stock markets right now. The market loses over 500 points, and then the next day is in the green. The following days it plummets again, and the teeter-totter continues its course. People seem to be split into two camps on the issue: some believe we are going into a double-dip recession, and others think that the market is just really volatile right now but that savvy investors will possibly save the day by buying up the stocks that others are jettisoning. I’m not exactly sure where I fall in this range. On the one hand I want to believe that we are only going through a rough spot and the market just needs to get a few bugs out of it. But on the other hand a part of me feels like we are heading towards something bigger than that. If leaders both here and abroad could just come to some sort of consensus about how to run their debt and fiscal policies, we might have a chance at building the economy back up. But while politicians duke it out in Washington and in Europe, the unemployment continues to climb, (see article: http://www.economist.com/node/21526408?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/doleful) both here and in Europe.
I believe people have been feeling very powerless lately to instigate any change for the better. If the politicians that we elected can’t figure out how to solve this problem, how can we make them listen to us and focus on what matters rather than squabble over party politics? Well, for one thing we could protest. But recently protests have been turning violent (i.e. England), and even when they aren’t violent, the authorities get anxious and start cutting into human rights, like in the recent San Francisco protests. Granted the protests in England were motivated mainly by the race relations in the UK, but many young people also used those riots as a time to vent their anger at the government and the high unemployment it had created.
I don’t have any answers as to how people could go about voicing their concerns in a better way, one that would catch the politician’s eye better than a violent protest. Right now I’m just voicing my observations, and hoping to hear what others think. If you have any ideas, or anything to add to this post, please leave a comment.