Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is urging Americans to look into the mirror. Look who we have become. It’s not pretty.

Let’s take up that call from 60 years ago and ask Americans, all of us, to re examine our attitudes. We have been immersed in a foreign policy discourse that is all about adversaries and threats and allies and enemies and domination. We’ve become addicted to comic book Good versus Evil narratives that erase complexity and blind us to the legitimate motives and legitimate cultural and economic concerns and the legitimate security concerns of other peoples and other nations.

We have internalized and institutionalized a reflex of violence as the response for any and all crises. Everything becomes a war: the war on drugs, the war on terror, war on cancer, war on climate change. This way of thinking predisposes us to wage endless wars abroad, wars and coups and bombs and drones, and regime change operations and support for paramilitaries and juntas and dictators.

None of this has made us safer. And none of it has burnished our leadership or our moral authority. More importantly, we must ask ourselves, “Is this really who we are? Is this what we want to be? Is that what Americans founders envision?”

Is it any wonder that as America has waged violence throughout the world, violence has overtaken us in our own nation. It has not come as an invasion. It has come from within. Our bombs, our drones and our armies are incapable of stopping the gun violence on our streets and schools, or domestic violence in our homes. Waging endless wars abroad we have neglected the foundation of our own well being. We have a decaying economic infrastructure. We have a demoralized people and despairing people. We have toxins in our air and our soil and our water. We have deteriorating mental and physical health. These are the wages of war.

What will be the wages of peace?