can only seem so to those ignorant or foolish enough to confine their thinking within the parameters of the virtual-reality programming that these days passes for news and information. Like characters in "The Matrix," we are told to take the red pill or the blue, though either one returns us to the same delusion. What's saddest about this commandeering of our minds is that the way to transcend the delusion is always at hand. It is as near, in fact, as the common sense of our own existence; our own worth and responsibility as human beings; our own vocation as people made to represent, without the aid of any media, the principle that not virtually, but truly determines our nature and that of the whole in which we exist. The issues that are the litmus test for this principle of reality are the very ones they run from, these red and blue politicos -- issues like abortion and homosexual "marriage," which often add a vibrant streak of yellow to their red and blue profession. The main imperative of their virtual-reality politics reduces politics to economics, economics to physical survival and physical survival to the faithless pursuit of material things. There is no place in it for the acknowledgment of our true nature, which includes in the account of our welfare the debt we owe to the Creator God. They are making of our politics what they have already made of what they call our sexuality -- a realm from which