The hard work is often tediously painful for both the personal and political.
Digging into ourselves for years in order to hold ourselves accountable and responsible for pains taken and inflicted is work we want to avoid, so we quickly displace our emotions into projection and transference: we blame someone else or fall in love with someone/something else.
Likewise, doing local election research is tedious, and filling out forms to sway a monolithic bureaucracy is soul-numbing. I would rather vent my feelings or develop insightful, pithy rejoinders to my opponents.
Yet, the hard work of both tasks (personal and political) examines reality over rationalizations and takes accountability: We damage others because we will not repair ourselves, and our state is a bureaucratic institution little swayed by communal catharsis.
It is not flashy; it doesn’t feel good, but this is how you make substantive change: patient accountability over decades.