the movement's ends will ensure failure.

Not all of us can take weeks off work and sleep in tents in a park.

This is particularly true of elderly people, many of whom have the time to join in actions for change but cannot endure the physical challenges that some of the young Occupiers do.

I attended the 99% training. The group was purposely kept small in numbers -- just the right size in my opinion. People of different ages ranging from high school age to in their 80s were present with a much higher percentage of older people than we saw in the Occupy encampments.

There was at least one person, maybe more, there who was quite possibly a libertarian. There were several social activists including at least one teacher and some people who had already participated in social actions with their churches. There were several who were facing foreclosure and others who had lost their jobs or couldn't get jobs.

We talked about how we got into this economic crisis, and it seemed to me that everyone pretty well understood that. In and of itself, the fact that the 99% training brought perfect strangers together (in real life, not on the web) and focused on the consensus among participants about the causes of the disequilibrium in our economy was an achievement. The more middle-class people who get this message, the better for the core Occupiers, the more support and less suspicion there will be of the Occupy actions.

The core activists have to remember that the whole point is to speak truth to the lies that the media has been telling the American people about who controls our country, what the day-to-day decisions on Wall Street and in our government mean in our lives, the role of Wall Street and the military/industrial complex as well as in the energy industries in impoverishing the middle class and devastating the already poor.

Any action, any movement, any discussion, any communication that spreads that message and accompanies it with a sense of openness, an invitation to creativity both with regard to spreading the message more effectively and finding new ways to deal with the injustice is good.

Those Occupiers who feel threatened need to remember that the whole point is to spread the news. And if others start spreading it too, great. The whole point of Occupy, in my opinion, should be to become integrated, co-opted if you will, into the everyday thought of middle class and poor Americans.

Occupiers should be trying to co-opt the Democratic Party and similar institutions rather than worrying about being co-opted.