GREAT WHEN WE COME TOGETHER, NOT SO MUCH WHEN DIVIDED.

It took only two days for Jamaicans here and abroad to raise more than J$12 million needed to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Sochi WInter Olympics in Russia next month. Two days! In the four years prior? Nothing.

It is remarkable how little bits of us can inspire a whole lot of us. Late last year it was Tessanne Chin who managed to galvanize Jamaicans both here and abroad. They threw their collective support behind her and made her The Voice, another feather in Jamaica’s already many feathered cap. Now, a two-man bobsled team that will be this tropical country’s entry into the Sochi Winter Olympic Games next month, has brought us together once more.

It was just two weeks ago that I spoke to Winston Watts, the captain of the team, as they tried to qualify for the Games during runs in Lake Placid, New York.  He told me then that he has had to be funding their team’s preparation out of pocket to the tune of about USD$17,000. He was doing it out of love, he says, because Jamaica has done so much for him.

Watts is 46 years old and has been a bobsledder through several campaigns. Now he is back and his passion, his drive; his story have caught the attention of the world and Jamaica along with it. It is often said that you have to first get global attention for Jamaica to pay attention and this is yet another example.

Tessanne Chin was known prior her entry on The Voice, but it is when she was identified as a potential winner that many of us started to really pay attention. Similarly, Jamaica’s bobsled campaign went largely unnoticed until news surfaced globally that there could be a Cool Runnings 2 in the works.

Cool Runnings, as we all know, is the 1993 movie that starred the late John Candy and was about Jamaica’s first entry into the Winter Olympics in Calgary in 1993. Jamaica’s failed campaign in Calgary had now become folklore. That folklore has now become legacy.

This latest campaign has shown that as a people; collectively, we can move mountains. We can do great things. The bigger picture tells us that sports and entertainment, our culture, are the only things that bring us together and allow us to demonstrate our power as a people. Everything else it seems divides us. Classism and our politics serve to divide us. They make us angry, they bring the worst out of us. Sports and culture however, do the exact opposite. They bring us together. They make us great.

Any wonder then that the people who lead us have no intention of focusing on the latter? It is easier to divide and rule than to help us to recognize and maintain the things and make us great.