In August, we bring a set of new full-time writers to the blog. Today, please welcome Loran Vanden Bosch (’21), who will be writing for us on the 6th of each month. Loran graduated with a major in writing and now lives in Rogers Park, Chicago. They are an active community organizer, facilitating a weekly writing meetup group called the Queer Writers Salon, working with the Sunrise Movement as the narrative lead of the Green New Deal for Chicago Public Schools campaign, and participating in the Chicago Conservation Corps (C3) program. They also have a blog on Medium.
In middle school I took a political party test to find out if I was a Republican or a Democrat. I wasn’t really sure what I was. The test told me that I was neither: I was smack dab in the middle, in the small bar of white. I was an “independent”—somehow an even blend of conservative and liberal.
In high school I took a government class and learned about the importance of performing your civic duty—as far as I could tell, that mainly meant voting. And voting usually required choosing one of two sides and firmly believing that your side was better than the other side. I could tell that I didn’t fit into that system. I was too conservative for my liberal high school friends raised by Democratic parents. I was too liberal for my conservative Christian family. I didn’t want to take a side; I wanted to be able to see everyone’s perspective. I wasn’t competitive enough to care about winning; I wanted to be but I didn’t seem capable of it. Most of the time I couldn’t get fired up enough (either positively or negatively) about a certain overweight orange-haired man; I simply did not care. I concluded that I simply wasn’t a political person. I would vote when required, but I wouldn’t go above and beyond: I wouldn’t major in political science, canvass for candidates, run for office, etc.
In college I heard about Andrew Yang. I read his books. Listened to his podcast. I was hooked. He saw the overweight orange-haired man as a symptom of the USA’s problems rather than the main cause of its problems. He was touching topics that no one else was speaking about at the time—the rise of artificial intelligence, the need for universal basic income, the stupidity of the “smart” elites, ranked choice voting. He didn’t convince me to get involved in politics, but he made me curious—at least until he botched his New York mayor campaign and I lost interest.
After college I watched the film Don’t Look Up and a YouTube video of a climate scientist crying as he glued himself to a bank that was funding fossil fuels. And suddenly I became more aware of the climate movement and the true stakes of the climate crisis than I ever had before. I felt like I had to do something. I researched various climate organizations and joined a Sunrise Movement new member welcome call. Then that summer I started phone banking for Summer Lee and Cori Bush. They won. And my life was forever changed.
Becoming alarmed about the climate crisis completely changed my mindset surrounding politics. I no longer saw it primarily as a competition between two sides where one side was completely right and the other side completely wrong, or as an exercise in celebrity culture where you went crazy for a certain candidate, consumed all the content you possibly could about them, and knew absolutely everything about their platform so that you could earnestly blab about them to other people. Instead, I saw politics through the lens of community organizing: it wasn’t about the candidates themselves, but about the community of people working together to back them, and the community of people these candidates were serving. I loved it—not immediately, but eventually. Unfortunately, it usually takes quite a bit of time to see the magic of community organizing, and our fast-paced culture doesn’t like that. But once you do see the magic you’re in it for the long haul.
Whenever I encounter someone who couldn’t care less about politics, I sympathize. I know what it’s like to have felt that way. And even those of us who are politically engaged still have periods where we wonder why we care and whether it would make more sense to give up. But it isn’t ultimately about winning or losing. It’s about listening to each others’ struggles and dreams and building relationships with each other so that we can have a chance of creating the future that we want. Now that I have a sense of what that’s like, my goal is to spread that vision to those who remind me of my past self. I really do believe that every new person joining this collective work deeply matters, and my hope for each one of them is that the movement gives them the real sense of belonging that a corporate political party never could.

Loran Vanden Bosch is a Chicago-based writer, tradesperson-in-training, community organizer, and long distance runner who graduated from Calvin in 2021 with an English degree. You can also follow them on Medium @loranvandenbosch.
A good read, a good journey … thank you.