How did you end up paying for college then, or buying your car?

I inherited a great deal of money from older family members as they would die or invest in a trust fund account that I later found out was probably partly responsible for the economic collapse. Even though I've been incredibly poor PERSONALLY since childhood because I've refused to work at anything but charity haunted houses, peace organizations, or the food bank I still am mindful that I am from an upper upper middle class family in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, so my quality of life has been better than roughly 96% of all other people ever. In some ways with a guaranteed source of food, energy, shelter, and education for the large majority of my life I might be considered a byproduct of an artificial post-scarcity system, albeit one predicated upon some pretty nasty family business going back several centuries (East India Company Presidents, Pesticides, Pharmaceuticals, Wal-Mart, Oil Companies, insanely competitive child-upbringings, etc.) None if this is really fair to have been born into (and I would have traded it for a normal family very quickly), but I must agree with the philosopher Peter Singer that Americans AS A WHOLE have no excuse for the vulgar wealth and luxuries that we enjoy while the rest of the world (and even the poor in our country) weaken from disease, starve, and die en masse.

I can't judge others harshly for their consumer faults because I know that my hands are VERY bloody, simply from my passive participation in our system as I knowingly by books that I don't need or technology upgrades with the same money that could be protecting infants from malaria, typhus, rotavirus, and AIDS. At any moment I could be looking around me and asking myself (as was done in the film "Shindler's List") how many lives my assets are actually worth. Yet out of a supreme cruelty I do not do this- I may do volunteer work regularly and give microloans and attempt to foment political agitation to improve the lot of those with less, but it is never a significant enough sacrifice when weighed against what should truly be done... even as I'm well-read enough to understand the serious implications of climate change I persist in traveling, using water and the internet wastefully, and eating bananas from thousands of miles away, with the consummate understanding that these very things will create potentially create a horrific superdrought that will end the lives of billions.