One summer, as he was living in Ames and working as a research assistant 
in a solid-state physics lab, the city was actually turned into an island for a 
couple of days by an immense flood. Along with many other Midwesterners, 
Finkle-McGraw put in a few weeks building levees out of sandbags and plastic 
sheeting. Once again he was struck
by the national media 
coverage—reporters from the coasts kept showing up and announcing, with 
some bewilderment, that there had been no looting. The lesson learned during 
the Sioux City plane crash was reinforced. The Los Angeles riots of the 
previous year provided a vivid counterexample. Finkle-McGraw began to develop 
an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that 
while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some 
cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value 
judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while
others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those 
days, never voiced.