A confession: exclamation marks

A confession:

I have an confession to make.
I sometimes use an exclamation mark to denote an intense feeling or an imperative command.
I know, I thought I was better than that too, but I have failed you dear readers.

The beginning:

Like the rest of us, I was introduced to the exclamation point in elementary school. Like all young children, I was enticed by the power it offered to me.
Normal sentences became something... more. Where my writing lacked pop, teachers and friends marveled at my mastery of the exclamation point. Everything I wrote was imbued with more emotion from one of the simplest strokes to learn in penmanship. I was unstoppable.

The simplicity:

It still marvels me with its simplistic beauty. A single straight line, sometimes wider near the top depending on the font, could change everything about a period.
The exclamation lacked the pretense of a question mark. It wasn't difficult to write, and it could be applied to any situation. A love note to girl in the hallway. An assignment about thankfulness for my family. It was even on some fancy graphing calculators.

The friendship:

Yes, the exclamation mark and I became fast friends, and we blazed trails across the frontiers of my developing grammatical skills in elementary school.
However, as Americans realized their manifest destiny was over at the sight of the endless ocean, so was mine upon discovering the sea of grammar in high school and college.

The chains of style:

I began, reluctantly, to learn the rules of style. Red pens tore into my papers and ego, and my once powerful writing was washed away in a sea of crimson ink.
One of the things washed away were the exclamation marks. They were declared tacky and a crutch of a weak writer, so I gave them up, but I did much more than that.
I turned once was love into hate for something I was no longer allowed to have. Anyone who used an exclamation mark was a simpleton, a failed writer, or generally lacking the excellent taste I had developed.

The regret:

But I knew, somewhere deep, that I wished I could bring the exclamation point back.
But I didn't. It was too far gone. When I realized my wrong, it had been high jacked by preteens and the illiterate on facebook. They threw it around like it was a common whore instead of the fancy lady it deserves to be treated like.
I was shocked. I realized I had treated it the same way when I was younger. It's a powerful tool, but only when used in the hands of the powerful.
And when should it be used you ask?
The suggestions:

Well , this site has some pretty good ideas of when, but I would like to offer an even simpler suggestions:

Allow exclamation points if you're willing to give up a lock of hair: I love this idea. It would cut down on the long hair of hippes everywhere while ushering a new gold age of appropriate exclamation use. Moreover, it would provide the sparring use required to make the exclamation point useful.

Put people in the stocks if they use exclamation points too much: Nothing reinforces positive behavior like getting hit with rotten vegetables and fruit, at least in my experience.

Do nothing: We allow the English language to be overrun by the abundance of unnecessary and overdone grammatical punctuation marks. When all has been destroyed, we can rebuild the language from scratch.

Stop listening to and/or reading sentences that have inappropriate exclamation points and/ or more than one: This idea I like the best. It's simple and easy to implement. It also allows us to avoid listening to half of the population.

A final note:

Again, I can't say what idea is right, but I do hope something can be done to save the exclamation point. It's done nothing wrong and no longer deserves such suffering at the hands of angry teenagers and poor fiction writers.
Take the time to use an exclamation mark correctly in your life. It can make all the difference for an oft abused punctuation mark.