As we contemplate the scary rituals and costumes of Halloween, we cannot help but reflect that the everyday world has become so spooky it makes the night of goblins and witches seem downright safe.

For example, we see the annual proliferation of rubber monster masks and skeletal getups in store windows that are intended to frighten children of all ages and compare the ability of them to horrify them with the world adults have condemned today's kids to grow up in, like real headless bodies being tossed into the streets of Iraq on an almost daily basis and real skeletons are unearthed in the mass graves left by Saddam Hussein’s barbarous regime.

Or how about the millions of fathers in Africa and the thousands right here in America who think it is their duty to mangle their daughters’ genitals to prepare them for a life of joyless marital servitude?

Of course, we can add to these frights the usual train of mass murderers and the explosive doings other world’s current crop of monomaniacal tyrants.

Compared to such real-life horrors, how frightening can a senior citizen with a pointed hat be, flying across the moon on a broom, screeching?

To diminish the effect of ghosts and goblins even more, we now got two scientists assuring us that the frightening creatures couldn’t possibly exist. For our take on this noteworthy oddity of the season, you would have to be a subscriber to our free newsletter, where it's the weekly exclusive. But you get the idea. We're not only hyping the horrors of the other days of the year; we're also diminishing the traditional frightening entities Halloween trots out.

What’s a haunting holiday to do? If Halloween is ever going to frighten children again, we’ve got to find a way to take at least some of the fright out of everyday life.

Tom Attea, humorist and creator of NewsLaugh.com, has had six shows produced Off-Broadway. Critics have called his writing "delightfully funny," "witty," with "good, genuine laughs" and "great humor and ebullience."

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