From time to time, Creators, the company I write for, gets out a book of my columns. The most recent book came out last Tuesday. It's called "The Land of Trumpin" and it's about 2016 and 2017, the year I lost so many of my own people.

I was a working-class kid. We lived in rented apartments with chain-store furniture. My folks paid the bills on time, but they never owned a new car and, when my father died, he left an insurance policy and a pinkie ring I wear sometimes.

I liked my own people, and two degrees in English Literature didn't separate me from them. Neither did a newspaper job where I wore dress shirts and sat at a desk. None of my friends were in the newspaper business, and most of them didn't have college degrees, except for a couple of cops who had salary-enhancing criminal justice degrees from third-rate colleges. I have friends who didn't finish high school. I have friends who don't speak English very well, and friends who have done a little time. I play by the old rule, which means that I don't care what you do or don't do, as long as I like you.

I was the only one in my newsroom who thought Donald Trump had a chance, and I thought he had a very good chance. I didn't think this because I was a political genius. I thought it because I knew a hell of a lot of people who said they were going to vote for him, and none of them were the reporters who worked with me.

I wrote about it because I get paid to write. Writing isn't my "calling," it's my paycheck. It's my mortgage and those two tacos I ate for supper tonight.

I wrote it all, column after column, coming home from my reporter's job to write, week after week, while the whole country boiled like water in a pot, while I learned to be afraid of my own people.

I'd always accepted the casual sexism, racism and anti-intellectualism of the boys at the bar, or the people who worked with me when I worked in hotel laundries and on loading docks. I knew most of it was just big talk, a laugh, a little bit of swagger while we wheezed our lives away for crap wages.

I just didn't think anyone would ever turn that casual fascism into a party platform.

When Donald Trump said we had a big problem in America and it was called "political correctness," I heard people say "damn right," and I thought, "This clown's likely to win."

I love my own people more than I've ever loved them, because they've set up a terrible whiplash that's going to come back on them like a striking snake. It sounded so tough, and it's going to end so weak. The country is rocketing back to 1905, crushing workers' rights, encouraging pollution, asking blacks, "Just who the hell do you think you are, boy?" and giving women the old kitchen/whorehouse choice.

It's male as hell, and stupid as hell, and it stinks like a bucket of dead fish in the sunshine. It'll make more poor people. Wait and see. My people are gonna take a two-by-four to the face, and they're gonna sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the big piece of lumber whistles through the air.

Creators took the columns I wrote during terrible 2016, and part of 2017, and they made a book. I hope people buy it, and not because I need the money to live. I've got a job, and I'm only five years from retirement.

I want people to read it because I want people to know that at least one of my own people can say he's sorry.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, "The Land of Trumpin" is a collection of his columns from the last presidential election. It is available for Kindle and Nook, and is also available in paperback.