Blame it on Rio

“No ICE please!”

There’s a moment that happens dozens of times a day across America.
A barista asks, “Would you like that iced?”
A server says, “Ice with your water?”

It’s such an ordinary exchange that it barely registers. Pure autopilot.

But what if this tiny interaction could double as political expression? What if the simple act of ordering a drink could quietly signal resistance to Trump’s version of law enforcement cosplay?

Here’s my proposal.

When asked about ice in your beverage, respond:

“I don’t support ICE.”
or “Who needs ICE?”
or “I don’t need no stinkin’ ICE.”
or simply, “No ICE, please.”

Yes, it’s a pun.
Yes, it’s a little absurd.
And, yes, very me.

In my experience, the best forms of peaceful resistance usually come with a smirk.

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Why This Works

The genius of this approach is its accessibility.

You don’t need to attend a march (though you should).
You don’t need to donate money (though that helps).
You don’t need special skills, a sign, or a Substack essay.

You just need to order a drink — something you were going to do anyway.

The double meaning creates an easy conversational hook. The barista might laugh. They might look confused. They might just nod and move on. All you have to do is smile.

You don’t need to launch into a TED Talk about immigration policy. If they ask, explain. If they don’t, that’s fine too. The seed is planted.

This isn’t about ambushing service workers with political diatribes. It’s about small, human moments of awareness. Less lecture, more signal flare.

Politics isn’t separate from daily life.
It is daily life. Even at the coffee counter.

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The Power of Repetition

Now imagine thousands of people doing this.

Baristas hear it five times a shift.
Servers start recognizing it.
It spreads from coffee shops to diners to airport bars.

It becomes a quiet, low-key signal — a wink between strangers. A tiny “hey, me too.”

That’s how ideas travel. Through repetition. Through ordinary spaces.

“We are the 99 percent.”
“Black Lives Matter.”
Simple phrases that moved from words to movements.

“No ICE, please” isn’t trying to be the next historic slogan — but it can still do something useful: keep the issue alive in our heads.

Because it’s easy to read a brutal news story about raids or deportations, feel furious for 20 minutes, and then go back to scrolling.

But if you’re saying this every time you order coffee, you’re reminded. Regularly. Personally.

It stays with you.

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Discomfort as a Feature, Not a Bug

Some people will find this awkward.

Good.

Comfort is rarely where change happens.

When we confine politics to protests or social media, the rest of life stays neatly undisturbed. Meanwhile, immigration policy is disturbing people’s lives every single day.

A mildly weird moment at the counter feels like a fair trade.

That said: read the room.

If your server is drowning in a lunch rush or clearly exhausted, maybe just skip the ice and spare them the bit. The goal is awareness, not making underpaid workers endure your performance art.

Be kind. Be human.
Just also be willing to be a little weird.

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From Beverages to Ballots

Let’s be clear: refusing ice will not reform immigration policy.

This is symbolic. And symbols alone are empty.

But symbols paired with action? That’s where things get interesting.

Think of this as a gateway habit.

Start with the joke.
Then donate.
Volunteer.
Call your reps.
Show up locally.
Vote like it matters — because it does.

The drink order isn’t the revolution. It’s the reminder.

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The Revolution Will Be Caffeinated

Or decaf. Your call.

Resistance doesn’t always look like marches and megaphones. Sometimes it looks like a dad joke with a political edge. Sometimes it’s just refusing to let the most important issues of our time disappear into the background noise of everyday life.

So the next time someone asks if you want ice?

You know what to say.

No ICE, please.

Paul, it’s called “Minnesota Nice.”

A long time ago — when Donald Trump was still on his first wife and had only three bankruptcies under his belt — my best friend moved to Wayzata, Minnesota. At the time, he was on the fast track at one of the largest insurance brokers in the world, and with my New Yorker’s view of life, I couldn’t fathom why they’d send him somewhere that regularly posted the coldest temperatures in the nation.

In other words, I was an ignorant bastard.

And he set me straight.

He told me the Twin Cities was one of the biggest corporate hubs in America — a startling number of Fortune 500 companies and dozens more on the rise. This wasn’t exile. It was a promotion. He was excited.

I, being a smart-ass New Yorker, just smiled and nodded.

“Good for you. If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

And off he went.

I figured I’d visit eventually. No rush.

Then he called and invited me for Thanksgiving. My own family had scattered that year, so I said yes.

When I landed, it was 20 degrees and snowing — basically confirming every dumb prejudice I had. But four years in Syracuse trains you for this kind of cold, so I wasn’t rattled.

On the way to his place, Rich said we needed groceries. His wife was on bed rest with complications from her second pregnancy. We stopped at Lunds in Wayzata. The size of the store — enormous compared to the shoebox markets back home — barely registers now.

What I remember is this:

Rich split the list in half and sent me off on my own.

I was completely out of my depth.

So I did what city people rarely do — I asked strangers for help.

And they didn’t just point. They walked me there. Smiled. Chatted. Helped like it was the most normal thing in the world.

The next day the high was 17. (November, folks.) We took his three-year-old to the Minnesota Zoo. Five hundred acres — nearly twice the size of the Bronx Zoo — trails, exhibits, space to breathe. A public park disguised as a zoo.

We started with the monorail.

Which, naturally, is where his kid chose to absolutely melt down.

As a single guy, I had zero tools for this situation. Rich wasn’t much better prepared. In New York, we would’ve gotten eye-rolls and side-eye.

Instead?

A couple of Minnesota moms swooped in like angels, calm and cheerful, helping us settle Patrick down so everyone could enjoy the ride.

No drama. No judgment. Just help.

That night, after dinner, when the house finally went quiet, Rich and I sat by the fire with a couple fingers of Macallan 18 — my single-malt phase. We stared into the flames for a while.

Then he asked, “So… what do you think?”

“Of the Scotch, the fire, or Minnesota?”

He’d known me since we were larva. The look he gave me said: knock it off.

I grinned.

“The Scotch is amazing. The fire is perfect. And the people here are so nice.”

“Yeah,” he said. “They call it Minnesota Nice.”

He lived there almost four years. I visited often. And little by little, I figured out what that phrase really meant.

It’s holding the door.

Helping your neighbor shovel.

Making small talk in long lines just to pass the time.

Sharing what you have.

Choosing kind instead of blunt.

Polite instead of confrontational.

Harmony instead of conflict.

It’s soft strength.

And lately, I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

The deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti — say their names — cut me to the quick. They reminded me that Minnesota Nice isn’t just manners.

It’s courage.

It’s saying, “Hey, I don’t hate you,” when someone else is spoiling for a fight.

It’s stepping in to help a stranger, even when it puts you at risk.

It’s standing beside your neighbor — documented or not — because they’re part of your community. Because they’re human.

Minnesota Nice means doing the right thing, even when it’s hard.

Even when it costs you.

The next few years, let alone the next couple of months, are going to be tough. We need to stand tall and be Minnesota nice.

WAFFLES!

That’s the proclamation I make to my wife, sister, and friends when the fluffy white stuff is falling from the sky.

This isn’t due to a brain injury or a neurodiverse condition. I know it’s snowing. I could easily say “snow.” But I don’t, because those who know me understand that long ago, in some breakfast corner of my deep, dark past, I decided I like waffles far too much. Given the opportunity, I would eat them every day, in every way. (The possibilities are endless: with chicken, fruit, stuffed, savory, Belgian-style, as sandwiches… you get the idea.)

I needed to curb my obsession with waffles; otherwise, I’d have to double my time at the gym—or my wardrobe allowance—as my waistline kept expanding.

So I made a deal with myself: I would only have waffles on days that it snowed.

Hence the happy, happy, joy-joy proclamation.

As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot about waffles this past week. Not only did we get six inches of snow on Monday, but all week long the weather prognosticators have been issuing increasingly alarming statements about the storm predicted for Sunday and Monday.

Or, as I prefer to hear it: two days of waffles. Oh yeah.

But winter storms weren’t the only reason waffles were on my mind. Like any right-minded person, I drown my waffles in warm pools of wonderful Canadian maple syrup. This past weekend I noticed I was out, so in my weekly Instacart order I added a jug of Kirkland’s finest. It was $14.99.

That seemed high.

So I looked it up. Last year at this time it was $12.99 — a 15% increase despite a bumper crop year. In other words, our demented leader, in his haste to prove his masculinity by imposing tariffs on countries that wouldn’t bend the knee, had made maple syrup a little less sweet for me.

But me being me, I had to take it a step further.

So I did a little research and came up with this grid.

The most positive thing I can say about this data is that consumers in the U.S. only had to pay about 10% more for their waffle breakfast in 2025 compared to 2024. And the only reason that’s positive is because it means retailers are absorbing some of the tariff costs.

The bad news starts with this: our waffles cost more than they did last year because of the non compos mentis whims of Trump, while our neighbors to the north saw virtually no inflation in the cost of their waffles.

It ends with an economic certainty. Even if tariffs come down tomorrow, we’ll still pay more for our waffles. Prices are sticky downward. Once retailers see what you’re willing to pay, reductions take a long time. COVID reminded us of that economic fact, and now retailers use AI-enhanced pricing tools that turn ordinary inelasticity into something closer to arthritis.

This didn’t ruin my love for waffles. I wouldn’t let Donald Trump do that to me.

Besides, waking up every morning without a news alert saying he didn’t survive the night already feels suboptimal.

But waffles gave me something else: hope.

Well, not exactly my waffles. The hope came from the Prime Minister of Canada, whose blessed maple syrup makes them sweet. His speech in Davos, delivered before global economic leaders, was a concise takedown of Trump’s economic agenda in a little more than ten minutes.

It was a call for realism, courage, and collective action among mid-sized democracies. He argued that the old world order is gone, that compliance is dangerous, and that only coordinated strategic autonomy can protect national values and interests.

He essentially told the emperor he had no clothes. As he put it, “the power of the less powerful begins with honesty.” The post-WWII order, he argued, has become a convenient myth. Middle-sized countries no longer need the United States to protect them, guarantee their currencies, or safeguard their geopolitical interests. The myth was worth sustaining as long as America acted in everyone’s best interest. But when it prioritizes only itself, that myth stops serving anyone.

He warned that “while there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along… to hope that compliance will buy safety… it won’t.”

And he declared, “Other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values.”

It was a calm, well-reasoned dismantling of the myths Trump has sold to MAGA and the U.S. — the idea that American exceptionalism means other countries must kowtow simply because we have a bigger economy and military. Carney reminded us that American exceptionalism was supposed to be about values. Other countries cooperated as long as those values aligned with their interests. Now that they don’t, the myth is losing its power.

Which brings me back to waffles.

The unspoken truth about eating waffles on snowy days is that they give me joy on a day when it would be easy to surrender to confinement, cold feet, and fogged glasses. And as delicious as my waffles were on Monday—and will be tomorrow—Mark Carney’s speech at Davos was an emotional waffle I needed in this long ICEy winter.

Long ago, in a galaxy remarkably similar to the one we live in now, I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine titled “Among the Euroweenies” by P.J. O’Rourke. It was a hilarious takedown of everything in Europe that Americans find just a little strange.

The gem I remember most from that story was his observation that European phones (we had landlines then, even though we didn’t call them that—we just called them phones) sounded like dogs farting.

While the wit was more profane than Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain, it captured the essence of what it’s like for Americans to travel. We see the world through our own lenses and, being as well trained as lab rats in a maze, notice everything that is different and wonder what in the hell got into these folks to be different from us.

What in God’s great universe makes them think their ideas are better than mine?

American Lenses, Foreign Logic

In other words, we are so in love with our own shit that we can’t accept the fact that someone else might have put more brain sweat into something than we did.

(By the way, this is the same thing that happens when your boss presents his idea as the gold standard and you point out the flaws—only to be asked to leave the meeting because you are “not helping.”)

Chief among these cultural irritants, for me, is electrical outlets.

Why is it that I have to carry a separate bag devoted entirely to plug adapters? Isn’t our American plug good enough for everyone? Didn’t we invent electricity? That’s what we were taught in school. Old Ben Franklin and his kite. Edison. Tesla. All Americans.

I mean, technically Tesla was an immigrant—but his pigeon was American.

Soap, Toilets, and Other Cultural Mysteries

On this trip, I’ve been struck by a couple of things that seem a little out of kilter to this American eye.

Let me start with the soap in our hotel room. The brand is called ToiletPaper. Not kidding. I have pictures. Why would anyone want to name a soap after a product used to clean your ass after defecating? Mind-boggling, the way these European minds work.

(By the way, the product works just fine. No complaints. Don’t sue me.)

The second observation is more delicate.

Toilets.

I’m not complaining about the two buttons. I like that idea. It seems smart. A little flush for things that wash away easily and a more powerful blast for things that don’t. It should be an American standard (see what I did there).

No—the toilet here at the Elaya Hotel has a viewing shelf built into it. How to put this delicately: instead of your deposit falling into a pool of water, like we have in America, it lands on a slightly angled shelf.

The only purpose I can conceive of for this shelf is the viewing of one’s shit.

Admittedly, we Americans do gaze into our toilets to see what our exertions have wrought (“I didn’t have corn last night”), but we do so through a layer of water that mercifully obscures our duty.

I think this is better for two reasons. First: smell. Maybe yours doesn’t, but mine does. Second: water magnifies. And while I like to think of myself as a big shit, I don’t really need the visual confirmation. That might be an ego thing.

A Final Word on European Showers

Finally, before I go out and sightsee, why do Europeans insist on showers that require either a master’s degree in plumbing or two solid YouTube videos to operate?

Granted, European showers are generally better than American ones—especially those with actual thermostats—but instead of leaving us to scald or freeze, they really should put up a QR code explaining how to properly use the damn things.

The Luxury of Being Confused

And yet, for all the baffling outlets, branded soap, porcelain viewing shelves, and shower controls engineered by mad geniuses, there’s something oddly comforting about being the confused one.

Travel, at its best, reminds you that the world doesn’t exist to accommodate your habits, your assumptions, or your plug adapters. It forces you—briefly, awkwardly—to laugh at yourself while standing half-dressed in a foreign bathroom, wondering which lever will release the water and which will summon the fire of hell.

And maybe that’s the real luxury of being abroad: not that things work better or worse, but that they work differently—and for a few days, you’re the one who has to adapt.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

I hope your holiday has been filled with the joy of the season.

As a Jewish family, we always celebrated Christmas. According to family lore, this tradition began with my mother’s parents. Her father was a physician, and somewhere along the way they decided to host a Christmas party for his patients and their friends. The idea, I’m told, was to lift the burden of hosting from their Christian friends and to create a place for anyone who might feel alone at that time of year.

I’ve never quite thought of it this way before, but their Christmas party was a mitzvah.

In any case, the tradition continued with my brother, sister, and me. We never had a tree—that was vetoed by my father, who grew up in a much more traditional Jewish home. But we had everything else: stockings, lots of presents, and marzipan pigs. And despite my father’s outward bah-humbugging of the holiday, it gave him immense joy to see his children swimming in a sea of wrapping paper.

More on him later.

I remember being old enough to realize that most Jewish families didn’t celebrate Christmas and asking my mother why we did. Her answer was that we weren’t celebrating the holiday itself, but what the season represents: peace on earth, goodwill toward all. A time when, no matter your background, your ethnicity, your color, or who you love, we recognize that we are all in this together. How you find peace with the universe is your business—and that is okay.

I’ve celebrated Christmas in that spirit ever since, because it makes complete sense to me. We can take one day a year to embrace each other with love and kindness.

But this year, I’m celebrating a little differently. Not because of the King of Mar-a-Lago and his disciples—I’m not going to let his lack of understanding of kindness and compassion poop in my Christmas cornflakes. It’s because, for the first time I can remember, I’m not spending the holiday with my family.

Before I go any further, let me add that I am spending it with the person who means the most to me in the world: Elaine. Last night we had a wonderful Christmas dinner, exchanged presents, and maybe even found a little mistletoe. Christmas would not be Christmas without her. She is my guiding star.

That said, my much younger sister—who I usually spend the holiday with—is in England with her family, celebrating with her ninety-six-year-old mother-in-law, who was widowed earlier this year. She is exactly where she needs to be, and I think that’s wonderful. We just miss her, my niece and nephew, and her terrific husband, Mark.

But before you get all weepy for me, stop. I’ll see my sister, her family, and—while we’re at it—our much older brother in just two days. In Vienna.

Later today, Elaine and I will head to the City of Waltzes, and to the city of my father’s birth, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Pop’s birth. In many ways, this feels like a Christmas miracle. The three siblings have never taken a holiday together. Not even as kids. (Did I mention my sister is much younger than my brother and me?) That we’re able to make this trip and carve out the time feels both amazing and deeply special.

I share all of this because, for the next week or so, the tone and timbre of my Substack will shift—from the political to the personal. That’s not to say politics won’t peek through now and then, but for the most part, I’ll be focusing on Pop and his legacy.

So this Christmas, I’m carrying all of it with me. The family I grew up in. The family I’ve built. The absences. The reunions waiting just around the corner. The love that stretches across time and geography and somehow holds.

In Vienna, I’ll be walking streets my father once walked, marking a century of his life while feeling his presence more than his absence. If the holidays are about anything, it’s this: remembering where we come from, honoring who shaped us, and finding moments—however fleeting—when the past and present sit together in peace.

That feels like enough. And more than enough to be grateful for.