OAKLAND, Calif. — Dozens of Bay Area protesters allied with the Black Lives Matter movement, along with members of an opposing group called All Lives Matter, were killed on Friday morning in a freak astronomical incident.
The BLM activists had gathered outside police headquarters to protest the shooting of a dark-skinned man in rural Afghanistan who allegedly did not drop his missile launcher when ordered to by police. The ALM activists showed up to counter the BLM group, and also to “defend all lives,” according to chapter president Lane Harrington’s Facebook page.
“Mostly white lives, though, but that’s just a personal preference,” it says.
However, their heated back-and-forth proved all for naught when a large flaming meteorite shot through the sky and slammed into the ground precisely where the protesters were hurling insults at each other. The resultant explosion created shockwaves felt as far away as Palo Alto. Authorities are still unable to determine if the 50 or so victims were crushed or simply evaporated.
“What the fudge happened here?” said Sgt. Doug McGibbons, the first officer to arrive on the scene.
Passersby rushed to the crater, shouting abuse at McGibbons and accusing the Oakland Police Department of failing to protect citizens against falling celestial objects.
Police responded with tear gas, but in a rare misstep, they accidentally used actual tear-provoking gas, which simply causes people to cry.
“This whole thing is just really sad,” said one bawling reporter from a local ABC affiliate.
In an effort to calm the angry and now sobbing crowd, Bay Area geologist Stanley Lapide was brought in to shed the light of science on the bizarre occurrence, but instead he ended up inadvertently causing further disruption.
“The victims of this meteorite came here today to insist that their lives mattered,” Lapide said through a loudspeaker. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but they were wrong, barring one or two improbabilities, in which case you could say that their lives mattered a little bit.”
“Tell us, professor,” the crowd shouted in unison.
“One: if the victims were indeed crushed, it’s possible that some bone fragments remain intact and will join the geological record, as a fossil or tightly enclosed in a rock stratum,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of years from now, cyborgs from another galaxy might unearth these bits and analyze them to better understand the nutritional habits of ancient sapient Earth dwellers.”
“Two: if the victims were vaporized, some molecules from their bodies drifted upwards and have been sucked into a jet stream,” he continued. “According to calculations I’ve just done in my head, that would yield a .00002 percent chance that they will affect the weather in some very imperceptible way, perhaps by adding a few drops of water to a light drizzle over some remote stretch of the Atlantic Ocean.”
“So, do black, white, or any lives matter?” he asked, but then stiffened and fell to the ground after being tasered by police who, due to the professor’s skin color, mistook him as a member of BLM. The esteemed professor went into cardiac arrest and was whisked away by an ambulance.
By that time, news of the unprovoked tazing had spread via Twitter with the hashtag #geolivesmatter, and dozens of faculty members from UC-Berkeley’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department showed up with signs reading “Geo Science Lives Matter” and “I’m Giving A Free Public Science Lecture, Bro, Don’t Taze Me.” When an armored police half track accidentally reversed over several of the scientists, the driver — a rookie officer who had only joined the force the day before, and had forgotten to put on his glasses that morning — was yanked out by a group of angry Stanford geophysicists who had just arrived by bus.
The young officer was beaten with his own nightstick, prompting hundreds of members of the local police union to cordon off the area so they could hold a protest in the name of Blue Lives Matter. However, by that point, it was discovered that at least one victim of the original meteorite impact had miraculously survived.
But cheers at the discovery were soon replaced by shouts as the feuding parties began to claim that the survivor was one of their own. Burned and unrecognizable, the person slowly climbed out of the crater and, with a marker, changed the police union’s sign to say “black AND blue lives matter,” a point on which all agreed until it became clear that the words were actually only referring to the minority population of bruised people.