The shots might have been fatal, but they might have also served as a wake-up call.

Everybody’s painfully aware of the violence engulfing southern Wisconsin after a Black man named Jacob Blake was shot by a white officer in Kenosha during a domestic dispute call. It didn’t take long for the protests to begin—and it didn’t take much longer for those protests to be overshadowed by riots.

For the last few days, my news feed online has shown broken glass from vandalized businesses, dozens of skeletal remains of vehicles that were destroyed by setting fire to a used car lot, and local residents looking shell-shocked as they saw their neighborhoods look like war zones.

For the last few days, I’ve been asking myself if we’ve reached the point in American society where carrying signs, chanting slogans and expressing your anger in a non-violent way are less satisfying to our psyches than committing acts of vengeance like a category five hurricane. Will we end up at a point where more people die from angry rioters in one week than the entire American death count from the coronavirus?

I remember when the riots in Los Angeles took place after police officers that beat Black man Rodney King were acquitted in 1992. Seeing those images were a shock to the system of a country boy who was left wondering, “How could we let things get so bad?”

Apparently, that was not rock bottom. Somebody threw America a shovel.

The beatings of Black people took a back seat to the deaths of Black people at the hands of the police. The body count ticked up. So did the anger. The communities where these deaths occurred were under a microscope for weeks as people protested, even for months as the justice system ran its course. However, it seemed like it was always happening somewhere else.

Then there was the death of George Floyd. He was another Black man dead after police officers took justice too far. After his death came the protests, but they were no longer limited to the one community where Floyd took his last breath. All over the country and even in some spots throughout the world, people raised their voices in anger crying out “No more!”

However, those protests quickly devolved into rioting. To those violent abscesses of society, it was no longer satisfactory that Minneapolis, the community where Floyd died, be made to suffer for the police department’s sins. There was looting and violence in other places, including Green Bay, Wisconsin.

I was in a hospital bed there at the time, and I saw the images on television and once again wondered how things could get even worse.

Yet we still hadn’t reached the bottom yet. Another shovel was thrown into the pit Sunday, when Jacob Blake was shot multiple times in the back. He’s fortunate enough to still be alive as I write this, although he’s likely to be paralyzed, but the rioters couldn’t wait for Blake to die and decided to make Kenosha look like Baghdad.

I remember that the Old Testament of the Bible indicates an eye of an eye when it comes to justice. It’s something that many denounce as too barbaric, but what rioters have done to Kenosha is akin to the whole body for an eye, and that’s even sadder.

Things got worse two nights later when 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse from Antioch, Illinois, fired an AR-15 in Kenosha and shot three people, killing two of them. The horror was caught on video by multiple cellphones. He was not old enough in either state to own such a gun, and lives were lost because he either did not have the knowledge to use that weapon properly, or he did not care that he was committing criminal acts.

I expected to awaken this morning to find out about more devastation in Kenosha, that the line of insanity had been moved yet again.

I was pleasantly surprised. The Associated Press reported that the unrest was minimal. Marchers were just marching. No one else was dying, according to the county sheriff, and the anger was starting to subside. Had the shots that came from Rittenhouse’s gun acted as a bell to alert people to the reality that the mission had gone incredibly off course, that returning violence with a more brutal level of violence was not the answer?

The issue of Black people being killed by police officers still exists, but people realized that the riots are not the answer—at least for one night. Whether that common sense will continue to prevail in Kenosha is questionable, and I have no doubt that the next Black life lost to the might of law enforcement will cause another eruption of violence.

Still, for one night, there was peace once again.