For practical purposes, I think about the Minutemen often when Titus Andronicus is conducting business, or even if I am not thinking about them, the values they helped to establish as a viable alternative for American punks are carried in every decision we make. What sets the Minutemen apart from a band like Fugazi or Crass, who would seem to have the market cornered on serious, high-minded righteousness, was that their righteousness was PRACTICAL. Even though they could talk at length about “world issues” or “foreign policy” or whatever, their philosophy was deeply rooted in the here and now, doubtless informed by their working-class upbringings. They provided answers to questions that were very much of the land: where are we going to sleep, what are we going to eat, how are we going to get to the show, and so on. In this, the Minutemen proved the classic cliché of the “personal being political.” Sometimes there is a tendency to think of a punk band as some kind of political machine, but really, when the whistle blows, bands are collections of individuals, and an individual is the sum total of her or his decisions, large and small. Every day offers the individual a hundred opportunities to “be the change [they] want to see in the world,” just by living in accordance with yr own carefully considered value system. Maybe it doesn’t “make a difference” in the grand scheme, but the Minutemen were rich in the truest currency upon this earth: the knowledge that yr actions came from an honest place in yr heart, and that they were undertaken because you wanted to, not as some grab at some imaginary brass ring, not to please some itinerant god, not to score a couple extra points in some game that nobody can agree on the rules to anyway. Or, to sum it up more succinctly, keep the overhead low.