When I was in school, we had an entire unit in history about Gandhi. We learned about his hunger strike, how he went to jail for his cause, and about the mark he left on India as a martyr. This is the first Wednesday since high school has ended and the things they have taught me are already starting to look more and more like band-aids over bullet holes. An article on Vice told me that Gandhi was much more complex than the picture-perfect portrait the history books give us. This is an obvious fact, to anyone past the sixth grade. Abraham Lincoln was not honest, Thomas Jefferson was an asshole, Benjamin Franklin was a misogynist.

But nevertheless, they still try to teach us that these men have done only good in their lives and they suspiciously skid over the ugly, humanizing parts of a person’s life. We never learn that George Washington pulled the teeth of his slaves before his presidency so he could be more attractive. We never learned about the countless affairs and vulgar things Franklin said about women, and we most definitely did not get to hear about Gandhi denying his own wife penicillin that ultimately led to her death. This is not the fault of our teachers and our schools. There is no right age to tell you that Sleeping Beauty was comatose, or that Belle was abused at the hands of her ‘prince’ - the Beast. But there is still a lingering thought in my head, a longing for more and more knowledge about the people we have come to see as ethereal.

The scrubbed-out, dehumanizing personas of our Founding Fathers (cheaters, abusers, misogynists) or the martyrs of freedom (perverts, men with the belief that they are superior to women by nature) make us come to see them as the statues and the illustrations on the dollar bills rather than regular, ordinary, awful people. I can take solace in the fact that Gandhi was far from perfect, in a way that still makes me sympathizes with the women and be repulsed by what he has done. I am in no way OK with what any of these people did, but it helps me to understand and even relate to them more. They are not perfect.

There is no such thing as a perfect person. In fact, the more that a person has done for their country or even the world, the more things people can shove under the rug. Oh, Alexander Hamilton had an affair? Yeah, but he established the first national bank. Things have not changed much; Bowie was a child molester and the ugly truth only gets shoved into the limelight when the most tragic part of being human comes to the surface. We forgive these people because they have helped on a greater scale than how they have hurt. We erase the wounds and the screams for help of the people who dare to tarnish the good reputation forged by historians to make history kid-friendly. We will never stop doing this in the same way we will never stop uncovering truth after years of blindly believing that there are such things as perfect people.