Let’s hope for a more peaceful ’16

Here’s hoping for a quieter year ahead.
Each December the newspaper staff puts its heads together to figure out the “top ten” local stories of the year.
It’s an imperfect process, and some of it is inevitably subjective. A list of potential candidates is drawn up. Other stories are added. Ones that seem interrelated — flooding and crop damage for instance — are combined.
Then reporters and editors rank them as best they can individually. After that, the same folks compare notes.
Usually, there’s not much disagreement. If there is, it’s more likely to be in the bottom half of the “top ten” than in the top half.
The goal is to help readers put some perspective on the year behind them, reminding them of where we have been as a community and where we seem to be going.
It’s usually kind of fun.
But it was less so as the staff looked back over 2015.
Jay County, normally about as peaceful a place as you’d want to call home anywhere on earth, isn’t somewhere associated with violent crime. But it was in 2015.
Two murders in the county, one of which continues to shock the conscience, and a double murder in Blackford County at the hands of a Jay County gunman were an obvious — if unpleasant — choice for the top news story of the year.
Why? Precisely because that violence was out of the ordinary.
The county normally goes years between reported murders. That sort of crime is rare here.
It was a selection that made no one happy, but it was the only one that could honestly be made. 2015 had given the county distressing and troubling news. There was no getting around it.
We’re just hoping the year ahead is quieter, more peaceful, and not so violent. — J.R.