Politics & Power Quote by J. Donald Walters

Walters frames empathy as infrastructure, not ornament. By opening with “realities we all share,” he borrows the language of universals to get past the usual identity tripwires - nationality, language, taste - and land on a claim that’s harder to dismiss: emotional care functions like nutrition. The move is rhetorically savvy because it drags “love” out of the realm of sentiment and into the realm of necessity. You can argue about politics; you can’t argue with hunger.

The subtext is quietly corrective. Walters isn’t just praising kindness; he’s pushing back on the modern posture that self-sufficiency is maturity. “As we need food” reframes dependence as biology rather than weakness, implying that cultures built around stoicism, competition, or “toughening up” are, in effect, running on emotional malnutrition. The list - love, kindness, appreciation, support - is also carefully chosen: it’s not only romance, not only private feeling, but a social ecosystem. “Appreciation” sneaks in as a civic virtue, a reminder that being seen and valued is its own kind of sustenance.

Context matters: Walters, better known in spiritual circles as Swami Kriyananda, wrote from a late-20th-century self-help and contemplative tradition that often tried to reconcile individual growth with communal responsibility. This line reads like a rebuke to both cold institutional life and the commodified “wellness” era: you can optimize your body, curate your identity, even accumulate comfort, and still be starving if no one is reliably kind to you.