Choosing Love: Mother of Sandy Hook victim brings movement to Keene
…her words are powerful, confident and upbeat, representative of the movement that December day in 2012 spawned. Lewis is founder of the Choose Love Movement, a program that thousands of schools in all 50 states have integrated into their curriculum and one that’s recently been adopted by Cutler School in Swanzey and Symonds School in Keene.
Michael Moore | Sentinel Staff
Choose Love is not based on sympathy, but self-empowerment and mental health. Lewis’s impassioned delivery — marked by smiles and warm memories of her son — led to a standing ovation from the audience. Not that there weren’t wet eyes, not with pictures of 6-year-old Jesse, murdered in his 1st-grade classroom, flashing throughout Lewis’s PowerPoint presentation. Yet her stories of his heroism that day and the Choose Love Movement he inspired filled the room with warmth and even occasional laughter.
“You learn a lot through difficulties in your life — in fact, that’s how we’re shaped and molded,” Lewis said early in her talk.
Lewis often punctuated her points with quotes from mental health and psychology experts, even world leaders, seminal phrases that helped form the foundation of Choose Love. One of the most poignant is from Nelson Mandela, and it goes like this:
“People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite … Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.”
Read the full story by Steve Gilbert (Sentinel Source) HERE.
