As the little witches, ghosts and goblins roam our neighborhoods Wednesday night, we might want to think about the bogeymen that haunt our adult lives. As children we learned how to cope with things that go bump in the night. We could do something about them. Like keeping the lights on, checking under the bed, locking the door and seeking comfort in a parent's arms.

Grown-up fears are another matter. They don't come in costumes, although they sometimes wear masks. We can do something about the rational fears. The masked ones are borne of ignorance and not as easily overcome. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the two. And sometimes we are manipulated by those who have something to gain by blurring the differences. Trying to protect ourselves from irrational fears makes us do stupid things.

Last week's wildfires were a terrible reminder of one of the greatest rational fears we face in this area. The other is earthquakes. We can't stop them from happening, but we can learn how to protect ourselves by reducing their threat to our lives. The outrage over poor emergency responses to the 2003 Cedar and Paradise fires led to far better communication and evacuation alerts this time around.

It's the fear caused by ignorance that leads to self-defeating behavior: the fear of homosexuality, gay marriage, cultural diversity and political and religious ideologues. The objects of these fears won't go away, which makes them all the easier for us to be held hostage by them.

Here's how some irrational fears have affected our lives lately.

A few nationally covered high-profile crimes exploited by fearmongers like Bill O'Reilly gave us Jessica's Law. Now we'll spend millions tracking sex offenders who've already done their time. Moving these ex-cons farther away from places where children gather will do nothing to protect them from the place where most molesters are found -- in the home among family and friends.

And, yes, bad guys from other countries may cross our border to do us harm. But now, thanks to the antics of folks like Minutemen leader Jeff Schwilk, we have a local congressman and unlikely presidential candidate running around the country boasting that he's built a fence around San Diego that's made our community safer. If that's true, Congressman Hunter, why are the local Minutemen still whipping up fear among the locals of a Mexican invasion?

Not long ago, all three of our local representatives -- Brian Bilbray, R-Solana Beach; Darrell Issa, R-Vista; and Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon -- voted against overriding the president's veto of a bill to expand the children's health care insurance program. While there was sniping about the cost of covering more children, and even a debate over how poor a kid needs to be to deserve government help, the opposition was driven primarily by the fear of socialized medicine creeping into our dysfunctional health care system.

These are just three examples of the kind of irrational adult behavior that is scarier than all the witches, ghosts and goblins of Halloween.

Carlsbad resident Richard J. Riehl is a freelance columnist for the North County Times. Contact him at RiehlWorld2@yahoo.com.