Last week was a sad one at the Sullivan County Jail in Sullivan County, Tennessee. An inmate passed away due to a medical issue.

I don’t know the inmate.

I don’t know anyone who works at the jail.

As far as I can tell, I don’t know a single soul living in a county nearly 700 miles away from my home.

I know what happened, though, because the story was shared on Facebook locally, passed around from local to local as “news you should know.”

They saw Sullivan County but never checked to see which one.

I had too. My worry that something had gone terribly wrong in our county seat was too great.

I was just a few sentences in when I realized the incident occurred more than 9 hours from Monticello.

That a life was lost is tragic, no matter the location.

Still, I’m not sure what was gained from reading this bit of news.

Haven’t we got enough to worry about in our own Sullivan County? Do we really need to take on the burdens of the folks in the Bristol, Tennessee area too?

In fact, there is a Sullivan County in Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania too -- six in total, spread out around the country. With all due respect, I’m not terribly interested in hearing their news either.

With just about 6,000 residents each, those in Missouri and Pennsylvania remain rather quiet. The Indiana version boasts closer to 20,000 residents but is likewise rarely in the news. As for the folks in the Sullivan County, New Hampshire, they’re ranked as living in the second least populous county in the Granite State.

With a population of more than 158,000 people, it’s the one in Tennessee that seems to make the most news, or at least the most news that works its way into my Facebook feed, stories of both good and bad passed from local to local.

I’d rather pass on the bad, and while I’m tempted to say I’ll take all the good news I can handle, I can’t help but wonder if we’d just be better off digging up our own.