Tennessee is getting tough on cigarettes:

The Tennessee Department of Revenue said Friday that it will begin conducting surveillance of state-line tobacco retailers in other states, looking for Tennesseans who are buying cigarettes there to avoid taxes.

Tennessee residents may legally possess no more than two cartons of cigarettes without the state tax stamp.

In July, Tennessee’s cigarette tax went from 20 cents per pack to 62 cents per pack, an incentive for many Tennessee residents to cross the state line to buy cigarettes at stores in neighboring states.

This, to me, comes close to running afoul of how the Interstate Commerce clause ought to be read. On the other hand, having to register things that you’ve purchased out of state is not something new and when it comes to guns we do it all the time. So wanting the in-state stamp of approval is not something new. My question is why, then, does this bother me so much? It’s not a smoker’s issue, in my mind, as I would react the same way if it were beer or playing cards or anything else. Also, I wouldn’t be bothered if cigarettes were banned in the state overall.

I can figure out why Tennessee would want to do this. No matter where you live within the state, you’re not too far from another state. So it would make sense that Tennessee, a high-sales tax state, would be touchy on this issue. So I came around to the idea that maybe giving people skirting the law a ticket would not be such a terribly bad idea. Then I read this:

Contraband cigarettes, and any vehicle in which they are transported, are subject to seizure, Farr said.

“If Revenue agents believe that an individual is transporting more than two cartons of cigarettes into Tennessee, the vehicle carrying the cigarettes will be stopped and searched,” Farr said. “If more than two cartons are found, the cigarettes will be seized and agents have the discretion to make arrests and seize the vehicle.”

That is an awful lot of discretion for a state police officer to have. I love the police, I do, but I don’t want them to have the power to decide whether to take someone’s five-year investment for getting some cigs while out of state.

I guess the main reason I am really uncomfortable is that this something that someone like me has done. Like Tennessee, Delosa is a high-sales-tax state with higher cigarette taxes than surrounding states. I would never go out of state for the sole purpose of buying cigarettes, but whenever I was out of the state I would make a point of picking some up. I actually did so even before I was a smoker because Mom would ask me to. I suppose if I heard about it the people of Tennessee have been warned about the consequences of doing such, but nonetheless people could face some pretty stiff consequences for committing a crime that it wouldn’t even occur to them is a crime. Also, this is not a new law. Even before this recent spate of publicity an officer could, if he wanted to, seize someone’s car for trying to skirt a little bit of sales tax.

Not sure about Tennessee, but in Delosa everyone skirts sales tax any time they leave the state. By Delosa state law, anything you purchase out of the state, you’re supposed to voluntarily pay state income tax. Nobody ever does, but the law is there. There was a hub-bub a couple years back when the State Treasurer slapped a fine on the Insurance Commissioner (both of whom were gearing up to run for the same higher office) for buying a bunch of furniture outside state lines and not paying the taxes on it. It all backfired on the Treasurer because everyone pretty much said “Holy crap! That’s illegal?!” and feared that the Treasurer would go after them next.

That’s just nuts.

State officials estimate that annually the new tax will bring in $195 million for education, $21 million for agricultural enhancements, and $12 million for trauma centers.

While I’m on the subject, couldn’t they at least pretend that this tax — a tax that will disproportionately target the poor and uneducated, I might add — has something (or at least more than 5%) to do with the public health?

Over at Bobvis there was a discussion about how much choice the unpopular had in their predicament. Spungen took issue with a recent poll that suggested that teenage girls with a stronger social situation are less likely to take abuse from a boyfriend:

As if it’s a ****ing choice. “Gee, should I stick close with my circle of friends? Nah, I’d rather wander around alone and hang out one-on-one with weirdos.”

By and large I agree with this assessment. Almost nobody chooses to have no friends. I do believe, however, that there is some choice involved. Some people are a little too happy off on their own that they don’t bother to cultivate the friendships they will later need. The conversation later turned to whether or not people are willing to cop to their unpopularity. Spungen believes that this is mostly not the case; I believe that people are fine doing so provided that they can blame it on a broken society rather than on themselves. I also made the comment that I knew more people that believed that they were helpless when there was something they could do about it than people that believed that their unpopularity was a choice when in fact it really wasn’t.

To which Spungen replied:

So Will, do you think popularity is available to everyone as long as they meet a certain set of criteria? If so, that would explain our conflict. I believe all (or most) systems have to have rankings, outcasts, and scapegoats. There will never room for everyone in the fold.

I agree that in most social circumstances there is never room enough for everyone in the fold. I’d also say that it requires more luck than anything to actually reverse your social situation for the better. I believe, however, that there are things a person can do that can help get them out of the social gutter (even if it lands you only a notch or two out of it). My experience (both first and second-hand) of unpopularity mostly pertains to guys rather than girls, so keep that in mind. In any event, here are the ways that one can improve their social standing:

1. You don’t have to outrun the gator, you just have to outrun the other guy. In this case, you make yourself a less obvious target than those around you. You make yourself look good by comparison. The cheap way to do this is to make other people look worse, but simply making yourself look better can help. This is really hard to do if you are unwilling to disassociate yourself with those that don’t change with you (which will be most of them). Nonetheless, in a larger social setting where you are not constantly with whoever it is that is hurting you socially, you can make some friends before they find out who your other friends are. That doesn’t work at all in social settings, though, and they will likely keep you running in place.
2. You can make a really bad situation not quite as bad by winning over the non-scared and non-malicious. There are people that will find some way to go after you. That’s a given. However, the better ammunition they have the fewer potential sympathizers you might get. The classic example here for me is my smell. I was not good about showering daily or wearing deodorant, which in the south that’s something you really need to be meticulous about. Not unexpectedly a lot of people ragged on me about it. I blew it off by saying to myself “Even if I didn’t have the smell they would just be making fun of me for something else. They’re just looking for reasons.” This belief was not at all incorrect. What I was doing, though, was warding off potential sympathizers by making myself more socially toxic than I needed to be.
3. The number of popular-to-unpopular people is not constant. If you behave like the unpopular guys, you’re all but guaranteed to be counted among them. Stopping doing so is not sufficient, but it is necessary to get out of that rut. If luck is opportunity meeting preparation, be prepared.
4. With some luck you can get a rabbi. In the 8th grade I had the good fortune (sorta) of being in the same class as a couple of the more pragmatic bullies. I helped them out with their schoolwork (ie gave them the answers) and they became what I call my rabbis. Their casual association with me warded off many would-be bullies, making my situation more tenable. They never would have gone to fight on my behalf or come to my defense, but they made it less likely that I’d need them to.

At least some of these would be unhelpful to young women since everything is so terribly different with them. Girls are more socially adept anyway and are much less likely to be lazy about hygiene and grooming. I suspect that only raises the expected standard to the point where money becomes more important to buy the right kinds of clothes and have the right kind of make-up, which is unfortunate. There are fewer ways on the whole a young lady can overcome not having money than a young man can. I’m so glad to be a boy.

None of these are going to take an unpopular person and just make them popular

Will posits, in contrasting his churchgoing nature with that of his lovely wife, the idea that for some reason, Catholics have a “Catholic or nothing” approach to religion. As one of the Catholics of which he speaks, I think I can shed a bit more light on this phenomenon.

The first issue for a Catholic, as opposed to many other churches, is that the gulf in beliefs is much larger. I am fortunate in that my family is of mixed demoninations: my grandparents are a Catholic/Lutheran duo who have managed to stay together for 52 years, and their kids turned out to be 3 Catholics, 3 Lutherans, and a Methodist. This has allowed me to see the differences in what is taught.

For a Lutheran going to services at a Baptist or Methodist church, or even to Church of Christ, there is not an immense gulf in belief. There may be minor dogmatic differences, but there’s a certain “protestant unity.” For a Catholic, the structure of the service will be vastly different; there are also major hurdles to get past (differences in the belief on various sacraments, possible differences in prayer structure related to saints, etc) before someone raised Catholic might feel comfortable attending such a church. By the same token, a Catholic would likely be much more comfortable going to mass in an Orthodox church, whereas I get the feeling most “Protestants” would be much more uneasy in that regard.

This also will extend to how the sunday services are structured. Catholics, for the most part, grow up with a basic sunday mass that includes a definite sequence of events. There’s a lot of sitting/standing/kneeling involved (aka ‘Catholic Calisthenics’ by some). Ironically, the reforms of Vatican II allowed for some radical changes and regional variations, and yet most of the churches I have gone to have seemed to carry much the same music, much the same organization, and much the same character. When I visited Germany, I knew the melody to every single song at mass as well as the sequence of events, even if I was tempted to sing in English rather than in German. Had I not understood a word that was said, I still could have followed the mass just on gestures and timing alone.

The other issue – strongly prevalent in the southern regions but still present nationwide – is a decided animosity towards Catholicism and those who are raised Catholic on the part of many/most Protestant churches.

If a Lutheran wanders into a Methodist church, and speaks to people there about curiosity towards their church, there’s a certain level of acceptance about it. If a Catholic wanders into the same place, there’s much more a “oh dear we need to save you from that evil church” vibe to the response. From personal experience and the experience of other Catholic friends, Baptists are actually worse on this, with many Baptist churches actually teaching that Catholics are “not really Christian”, that their baptisms and sacraments are all 100% invalid (one particularly ugly implication being that Catholic marriages are invalid and they are “living in sin” and producing out-of-wedlock offspring), and other rather nasty things. The one Baptist roommate I had during my college years was 100% friendly, right up until he learned I was attending the Catholic mass on campus; after that point, he decided he hated me.

The more “born again” the particular Protestant branch is, the more likely they will have this sort of reaction to a Catholic. A few places I’ve been, admitting to being Catholic was somewhat akin to telling them to hang up the garlic wreaths and start sharpening the oaken stakes.

This is not to say that all Protestant churches are that way. Lutherans have a varying level of animosity depending on which Synod they belong to, and some have mellowed out in recent years (when my grandparents were married, they had to have a civil ceremony because neither church would take them; at their 50th anniversary, the pastor of my grandfather’s church had nothing but good to say about them, including regret that his church had taken so long to come around). I’ve found Methodists to be much more inviting than Lutherans or Baptists, though they are amazingly hardcore about their music; one imagines that someone tone-deaf might have a hard time there, or at least become very good at lip-syncing.

However, as for just picking up and going to a non-Catholic church? There are a lot of extra barriers to overcome, erected both by the Catholic beliefs and by the other churches.