If I can’t smoke, you can’t talk.

We have these little compromises all over the place. There are highway signs that tell you if your wipers are on, your lights must be, too.

Construction guys have to wear hard hats to cross a certain line and restaurant employees must wash their hands after they use the bathroom.

And just as there are traffic tickets for drivers, there should be lynch mobs with torches and rope, patrolling public places and ferreting out anyone who speaks on a cell phone in any place where you wouldn’t light a cigarette. Offenders should be severely punished right there in the mall.

Cell phones are like cigarettes were in the ‘50s. Everyone uses them everywhere all the time.

The lady in the grocery store behind me yapping in Spanish. The fat guy next to me in the elevator explaining why the doctor won’t be able to remove his boil. The 9-year-old girl in the record store with the bootie shorts that say “sexy” on the back, talking about why “Dana didn’t even need to be wearing that shirt.”

Enough!

Listen, I have a cell phone. A little silver one that I like very much.

Having it is certainly better than what I grew up with, getting privacy by shutting myself in a room with the tangled cord on a yellow phone stretched from the kitchen through the dining room door.

And it certainly beats sitting helpless on the side of Route 49 with a blown-out tire, hoping that the figure I’m seeing coming up the road is the AAA guy and not a bear.

But cell phones are becoming like breast-feeding at the ballgame. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, especially if you’re making everyone around you simultaneously search for a new seat.

And don’t tell me you need to take the call. You don’t need to take the call any more than I need to smoke.

You want to.

But just like me with my cigarettes, you should have to wait until you’re away from people who don’t want to hear you yapping to your friend about how they turned the lights off in your apartment again because your baby’s daddy didn’t send the check.

Cell phones, with their played-out ring tones and locker-room pervert cameras, have brought out our worst arrogance: that the rest of the world cares about our little lives and to hell with them if they don’t.

Well, guess what? There are some places where people should just have to sit down and shut up.