The optimism of aspiring economist Miss Okeina Tia Matthan is infectious.

“There is so much to do, so many new people to meet and places to see,” Miss Matthan, who grew up in Denham Town, West Kingston, experiencing hard times, fear, grief and desolation, told our reporter in a story published Sunday.

And while noting that the “environment [in which she grew up] would affect anyone” Miss Matthan, now a student at The University of the West Indies, is urging other young people to “be patient with yourself and don’t feel down because you don’t have all you want yet. Your time is coming”.

Miss Matthan may well have been ‘saved’ by time spent with a relative in rural Jamaica during the security forces’ operation in Tivoli Gardens in 2010, and subsequent first-rate high school education at Immaculate Conception in uptown Kingston. Even with that, her own strong will and the support of those who cared no doubt aided in her positive outlook.

It’s a far different story for many others.

Consider another inner-city youth now 25 — his name withheld by our reporter — who has fled to the United States without completing his degree because of “numbing fear” that has lived with him since he was 13. Back then, a gangster in his community told him he was likely to be murdered before he was 18 because he refused to take orders.

He kept pushing to leave Jamaica “because even though the US is not a bed of roses, nowhere could possibly be worse than where I lived…”

That’s the reality for people, not least the young, in far too many communities.

Nor is there easy opportunity for rehabilitation when wrongdoers are caught and imprisoned. Quite the contrary is probably closer to the truth.

Note the words of a correctional officer who spoke to this newspaper about the horrific conditions prevailing in our ageing, dilapidated, overcrowded prisons. Some inmates, he said, are without basic facilities such as bedding and sheets. How, he asked, can rehabilitation be expected in such a situation?

And what’s to happen when hardened criminals return to the streets, having served their time, embittered and even more committed to evil than they were previously?

Nor can we ignore the concerns of former head of the Kingston Restoration Company, Mr Morin Seymour. No matter what current numbers may show regarding any confined space, the inescapable fact is that “dirt and crime go together”.

Mr Seymour says he speaks only in relation to the capital city. But garbage is piling up at alarming levels across the country, matching, it seems, rising crime and delinquency. This happens as the cash-strapped Government awaits arrival of garbage collection trucks which, we hear, are likely to prove inadequate given the scope of the problem.

Are these problems and many others — across a range of sectors, including health and education — insurmountable? They will be if Jamaicans and their leaders seek to approach them in the old ways which have not worked.

The situation cries out for Government and Opposition, business sector, trade unions, Church, civil society, community leaders to come together in a grand alliance, a national movement, to find solutions.

Consider us naïve if you like, but we see no other way.