Aging & Wisdom Quote by Andrew Vachss

There is no comfort in the “we” here. Vachss isn’t inviting solidarity; he’s issuing an indictment. By choosing the collective pronoun, he drags the reader into the crime scene, refusing the easy escape hatch of blaming a few monsters “out there.” The sentence works like a verdict: two clauses, no ornament, linked by “and” as if neglect and complicity are not separate failures but a single ecosystem.

“We don’t protect our young” is a moral baseline so obvious it’s almost embarrassing to have to state. That’s the point. Vachss forces the listener to sit with a society that can build prisons, pass budgets, and police borders, yet somehow cannot reliably shield children. The subtext is institutional: schools that look away, families that rationalize, courts that bargain, bureaucracies that misplace urgency. “Protect” is active; not doing it is a choice, not a tragedy.

Then he sharpens the blade: “we tolerate predators of our own species.” “Predators” is deliberately zoological, stripping perpetrators of the humanizing language that often arrives as mitigation (troubled, misunderstood, promising). But “tolerate” brings the critique back to the social. Predation persists not only because some people harm, but because others absorb it - with disbelief, politeness, reputational triage, and procedural delay.

Vachss wrote as a crime novelist and a longtime advocate for abused children; his world is one where the real horror isn’t deviance, it’s normalization. The line aims to make tolerance feel like participation, and that’s why it lands.