Columbus Day is coming up, and I’m sure you are all busy making those last-minute holiday plans.

Though Columbus Day is actually Saturday, the “Official Observation” is Monday.

“Official Observation” means that everyone gets the day off work except you.

In addition to wild Columbus Day celebrations, this annual event is usually marked by protests of people who wish to vilify Columbus simply because he was given credit for things he didn’t do and was responsible for starting the attempted extermination of the people he “discovered” in the New World.

America is going through a period where all of our heroes, the people we have been taught to admire, are being reexamined.

We are discovering that maybe they weren’t so great after all. As a result, many who once admired these people are feeling disillusioned, and some are just angry and defensive.

The problem is that we build people up to be more than they are. Those who accomplish great things are thought to be immortal, infallible.

If we can admire people’s accomplishments without getting too attached to the people themselves, we would all be better off.

Let’s examine Columbus. The fact that he stumbled across some islands in the Caribbean did inspire other explorers to come to the New World, which led to colonization and the establishment of the United States. You probably think that was a good thing if you happen to be of European decent. You may not think it was so great if you are the descendant of a Native American or a slave.

Also, there is evidence that there were Scandinavian explorers in Canada long before Columbus set out to find a new route to the Far East.

The Scandinavians simply made the mistake of not bragging about it to the Western European scholars who wrote the history books.

So, which Columbus is the right one? The pioneering explorer or the father of the movement to eliminate Native Americans? Was he a good man or a bad man? Is asking several rhetorical questions really a good literary device? We can never know if Columbus, or anyone else, for that matter, was good or bad. What cannot be questioned is that he was flawed, just like the rest of us. Everyone is flawed to one degree or another.

For Europeans, Columbus opened the door to the New World. He had little to do with the consequences of that. We can admire his achievement without having to attach God-like status to the man.

Another example came up recently in my English class. The class was having a hard time reconciling two sides of Thomas Jefferson.

There was Jefferson the statesman and author of the Declaration of Independence, who denounced slavery in his writings. There was also Jefferson the plantation owner who owned slaves, despite the fact that he was financially capable of hiring people to work his plantation.

We are left with a choice between Thomas Jefferson, one of the great statesman and philosophers of his day and a founder of our country, and Thomas Jefferson, slave-owner and hypocrite.

I’ll advocate the radical theory that we shouldn’t have to choose between these two images of Thomas Jefferson, because both are correct. Admire the great things he did, condemn the bad things he did, but don’t assume that he was anything than a man was flawed, just like everyone else.

Our society in general is willing to overlook the fact that Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves. The racism of some of the people we are taught to admire has been swept under the rug, and has contributed to the fact that racism is still tolerated today.

We need to accept that no achievement, no matter how great, should keep us from recognizing the flaws of our heroes.

Jefferson and Washington owned slaves, and they were wrong to do so. Ignoring or trivializing that fact only encourages tolerance of racism today. This is not to say that we shouldn’t have heroes. Ryne Sandberg is one of my heroes because he is a great baseball player who plays the game with intensity, passion and class.

I have no delusions about him being a great man, because I don’t know him. I only know that he has done what I consider to be great things, which is all we can know about anyone.

If we stop believing that people who do great things are perfect, we won’t be so disappointed when we discover they are not.

Steven Martens is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Cedar Rapids.