At least we can agree to demilitarize local July Fourth festivities.

Like many Monterey County residents, especially in that era, Rick Johnson first arrived to serve in the Army. In his case, it was to study French at the Defense Language Institute in 1968.

He returned and built an adult life here, and even before he became the face of the Old Monterey Business Association for some 20 years, the organization that eventually took over managing Monterey’s annual Fourth of July parade, Johnson got involved in community events. He remembers attending a parade in the 1990s with his family, when his children were little. And he remembers how startling it was when a tank rolled down Alvarado Street.

“It was controversial, extremely confrontational,” Johnson recalls. “Part of the group watching the parade ran out and laid in front of the tank so it couldn’t go. The other half of the people were yelling, ‘run over them.’”

In case you thought Americans today are more divided than ever, it’s a reminder that what’s old is new again.

The group that laid down in front of the tank was organized by Phil Butler, the longtime leader of the local Chapter 46 of Veterans for Peace. Although after the parade the tank did park in front of Colton Hall and invite children to clamber all over it, the tradition of sending war-fighting equipment down a modest downtown street for a celebratory, family-friendly parade came to an end.

So Butler’s successor, Justin Loza, was alarmed to see vintage military equipment rolling along Alvarado Street during the 2025 parade. He considered a similar action this year, but he did something radical – he asked the organizers nicely if they would forbid military equipment. They said yes.

“We said no tanks,” says Old Monterey Business Association Executive Director Sabrina Hiltunen. (OMBA hires a parade producer, who contacted a military vehicle collector club and received no response or any type of pushback.)

OMBA’s reasons are less about taking a pro-peace stand and more about common sense – tanks tear apart streets – but the military will still be well represented in a military town. Of 78 groups participating in the parade (the largest ever), there are multiple veterans groups. The 130-member Impulse Drum and Bugle Corps is coming from Southern California. Navy Capt. Ryan Easterday serves as a marshal. The General Phil Sheridan Camp No. 4, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and Commodore Sloat Chapter, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, are expected to bring 10 marchers each.

“I am standing up for the country, absolutely.”

“It’s something we have a balance,” Hiltunen says, “to consider the history of Monterey. The military is a big part of our community presently, as well as in the past.”

Twenty-plus years ago, Loza enlisted at 18 in the U.S. Air Force, animated by the War of Terror that followed 9/11. He deployed to Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates. He towed the company line.

But his thinking about wars of choice evolved, and after he completed his military service, started a career in IT and moved to Monterey, he became an activist. During Donald Trump’s second term, moved by military actions in Venezuela and Iran (among others), he has grown into his role as an organizer. And he still feels patriotic in his new role as a protester: “I am standing up for the country, absolutely, 100 percent,” he says.

Loza will be at this year’s Fourth of July parade in Monterey, to celebrate the many rights this country affords him, and he will not be lying down in the middle of the road thanks to his friendly and constructive exchange with OMBA.

“I know that our country was born out of violence and it is part of our culture, but we don’t need to perpetuate that,” he says. “The tools to achieve those means are not what make us a great country. We have to have tools like that to protect ourselves, but we don’t need to make that a central piece of our pride. It perpetuates a culture of militarism.”

Some of his colleagues will be observing the Fourth of July in Philadelphia where it all began 250 years ago with protest actions planned, but Loza is focusing on something remarkable here at home: honoring tradition while taking a stand without glorifying killing machines.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com.